Hell Bent: Ranking - 250

  Hell Bent

(Series 9, Dr 12 with Clara, 5/12/2015, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Rachel Talalay)

Rank: 250

How those Dr Who stories might loom if Disney insist on remaking them: ''Err, you know that legend about Gallifrey and the hybrid? Well what the history books don't tell you is that we were visited by time-travelling Wuzzles from outer space. The Master is really Rhinokey, The Rani is Butterbear, Omega is Elaroo and Rassilon is Hoppypotamous!"

Gallifrey! At last! Not seen on screen since 1983, demolished off-screen in a time war, revived in 2013 then ignored for two long years. And this time, surely, they had the budget to put it on screen properly, the way we always saw it in comic strips and in the masthead at the top of the letters page in Dr Who Magazine. Finally The Doctor was going home and finally, following that cliffhanger from last week, fandom was ablaze: this was it! We were actually going to see it! And we did…The inside of a barn, some weird Matrix turned physical maze that contradicted everything from the old series (the old version was more like the internet in a hat; this version is a guided your round a coffin – which I guess is closer to what the internet had turned into by 2015 if nothing else) and a few brief snatches of desert. It’s not that ‘Hell Bent’ is bad exactly. It’s not as if it does anything as terribly wrong as some of the episodes around it at the bottom of my ranking list. But the story just utterly refuses to go where we all thought it should: the return of Gallifrey is a brief backdrop rather than the main theme of the episode, Clara is (spoilers) back from the dead undoing two episodes’ worth of hard work in the process and the season arc, about whether this new Doctor is truly a good man or not, ends up with a brief shouting match and a sudden change of mind. There we were after the cliffhanger of ‘Heaven Sent’ where an angry Doctor stalks his homeland seeking vengeance, expecting an episode full of action and all we got was a lot of talking. As an episode it’s a bit on the dull side, pointlessly stretched out to a full hour rather than the usual 45 minutes. As a series finale it’s a definite damp squib. As a big moment for fandom to collectively savour it’s a complete non-starter. Yet unlike other stories from the bottom of the pile it’s not that this story had a classic recipe to follow and had all the ingredients needed to make it good – it was just that no one seemed to turn on the oven to cook it properly. So there ‘Hel Bent’ sits in the middle of the 12th Doctor era, a stodgy indigestible bit of exposition and arguing, as two characters who have already said goodbye to each other so many times by now wave farewell all over again, in what feels like slow motion. What the hell happened with ‘Hell Bent’? 

Well, it makes more sense if you realise that this was, originally, going to be Steven Moffat’s long goodbye. By 2015 he’d been in charge for five years – as long as Russell T Davies had (and he’d ended his last year with a run of four specials rather than a full season of thirteen episodes). Steven had mentally handed his Tardis keys over to Chris Chibnall, fully expecting the new showrunner to take over the following year and the only question was whether the handover would happen before Christmas or after; either way this was the last time Moffat was expecting to write a series finale and he came into it expecting to make it his big farewell gesture. Somewhere between writing this story and filming it things changed. ‘Broadchurch’, Chibnall’s surprise hit of 2013 starring a grumpy David Tennant alongside a very Rory-ish Arthur Darvill and a rather static Jodie Whittaker, had just been commissioned for a third series. Rather than simply throw himself into Dr Who Chibnall begged to have more time to be ready. Faced with his favourite show, already in something of a ratings decline, going off the air for an extended period or writing for it a bit longer Moffat went with the second option. Which meant having to tweak this episode from the big peak it was obviously intended to be, the end of a companion rather than the end of a Doctor or the end of an era. All the big punches that ‘Hell Bent’ is trying to pull – what the Doctor has been turned into by grief, what lengths he’ll go to on his home world to get his own way, his shared need with Clara to desperately have the last word – feel as if they’re pulled back from fully hitting, as if Moffat knows that he’s going to have to top this himself one day rather than cheerfully leaving his successor to do it. ‘Hell Bent’, intended as the final exclamation mark in the 12th Doctor’s story, ends up a pause. And not a particularly inspired one. 

 I mean, it’s not for lack of trying. There’s a moment in the opening quarter hour when it really looks as if this story is going somewhere. There we are back on Gallifrey at last, which looks every bit as impressive (and orange!) as we’ve been led to believe, albeit only in the recap from last week (it is one of the best shots of the modern series so no surprise they use it again so soon – or that they can’t afford to show a second variation). The Doctor is angrier than we’ve ever seen him, stomping his way across the planet seeking vengeance for being stuffed inside a confession dial. A group of soldiers turn up threatening to shoot him –but they are a lot more scared of the Doctor than they are of their boss Rassilon (only seen once in the modern series, in ‘The End Of Time’ – he’s had a regeneration off screen, Timothy Dalton perhaps seeing that he had even less to do in this script than last time and going off to earn proper money singing Abba songs badly in Greece; to be fair The Canary islands makes a quite brilliant stand-in for Gallifrey, looking hot enough to be believable as a planet revolving around twin suns). It feels as if it’s all heading up to a huge showdown, the Doctor – the man of peace – in the ultimate fight between his head and his hearts over whether he wants the people who set up the ‘raven’ trap that killed Clara and stuffed him in that dial for several billion years to pay or whether he does the Doctory thing and forgive them. Shockingly, he chooses the former in an unexpected twist where he shoots The General, not exactly the good guy but definitely not the bad one either, ending a regeneration in his anger and need to get away (he becomes a she, the first time we’ve seen this on screen: which is a shame as I figured most timelords had a gender reveal party each time they were about to change). Brilliant: this story feels every bit as big as we were led to believe. 

Then it goes downhill quickly, suffering from all of Moffat’s weakest aspects as a writer. He continues his obsession with the Doctor’s childhood, with a third appearance of the barn where he grew up which the Doctor never mentioned and which we never saw in the first fifty years of the show (if it had really meant that much to him it’s odd the Doctor didn’t, say, make a break for it in ‘The War Games’ or hide out from the Vardans in ‘The Invasion Of Time’). Honestly I’m not buying it: Moffat’s opinion of the Doctor continues to be that he was a very scared little boy who ran away from Gallifrey because of fear – it makes so much more sense of the rest of the series of he ran away partly out of boredom and partly to put the wrongs of the universe right. There are hints of the Doctor’s mother all over again, but if they weren’t answered properly by Russell in 2010 there’s no way Steven will unwrap a mystery in 2015 so we’re left as confused as ever as to who these people are and what they mean to the Doctor. The feeling you get, even if you’re enough of an anorak to have seen all the episodes leading into this one multiple times like me, is that you’ve missed something somewhere, that these characters know a lot more than we do. Take the question of ‘the hybrid’, this week’s big scary thing which the timelords have become so obsessed with that they locked the Doctor away: it arrives out of nowhere at the end of ‘Face The Raven’, becomes the pivotal point of two stories, then gets ignored completely by the end of this one, to never be mentioned again (for what it’s worth Moffat’s said in interviews since that the hybrid is the Doctor and Clara, rather than Ashildr’s guess from the TV Movie that the Doctor is ‘half-human’, but it would be nice if we had evidence of that on screen. For all we know Gallifrey is invaded a few minutes after the Doctor leaves at the end of this story by an Abzorbaloff-Voord hybrid that destroys the planet before tripping over his fat little flippers). Big issues are raised, then ignored, then told in the wrong order: seriously that tease of the Doctor and Clara talking in a 1950s diner, just when fans were expecting full-on Gallifrey, is just teasing for the sake of it and totally gave the game away on first viewing if you were paying close enough attention. There’s no reason for this story to be as overly clever as it is: at heart this is a simple story about a good man going to war (again!) and what happens when the people he loves aren’t there to stop him. Only that idea got muddled when he insists on reviving the person who should have stopped him and becomes more about him finding his peace with her. Gallifrey, so central so important so advertised as the big blockbuster finale, fades into the background to be forgotten all over again (until being revived as an even less interesting backdrop to ‘The Timeless Child’ arc). 

 ‘Hell Bent’ is, it seems, hell bent on making us care about the Doctor’s relationship with Clara more than his own people who have (rather miraculously) survived both a time war and his own solution to ‘The End Of Time’. Nothing against Clara - I like her more than most of fandom seems to, even if she was never as interesting once she stopped being a riddle with the 11th Doctor and become a conventional English teacher with the 12th. It’s just that she already had a good death and the Doctor's spent an entire episode and several thousand years mourning her already. Moffat’s always had a phobia about killing his characters off so he revives Clara for a coda she really didn’t need, caught between heartbeats using timelord technology and the story then turns into a domestic about whether he has the right or not, for a sub-plot that lasts most of the rest of the episode. Clara has already had so many ends as a companion: her most perfect one was in ‘Name Of The Doctor’ where she goes back through the time streams of her best friend in order to save him; since then she’s fallen in love and seen her boyfriend turned into a Cyberman from beyond the grave, spent an entire Christmas moping in an alternate timeline and spent a year pushing through her grief trying to be more like the Doctor: though it’s a rotten episode in so many ways at least ‘Face The Raven’ gives Clara a worthy finale, where she pays the price for trying to copy the Doctor and be bold and heroic without his knowhow, her worst quality (her occasional arrogance) her downfall in a very ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ way (albeit with a bird not an insect). Here she’s revived all over again, tells the Doctor to let things alone (a lesson he should already have learned after what happened to Ashildr in ‘The Girl Who Died’) and does one last Doctory thing by ‘reversing the polarity’ of his latest gadget so that one of them will lose their memories of the other. He, in turn, does one last Clara thing by stubbornly refusing to give in and pressing the button anyway, losing his memories of her in the process. At no time do the two of them do anything natural like, well not hug exactly (the 12th Doctor’s not a natural hugger) but you would think there would be some point where they at least seemed pleased to see each other again. instead of being an episode about two old friends, one of whom kept quiet for billions of years and risked life and limb to bring her back from the dead and the other of whom died trying to make him proud, would have learnt something from all that they had been through. Instead, yet again, this story ends up being about the two of them fighting to have the last word – and the last memories. It’s a game they’ve always been playing, at least since the Doctor had this face, neither of them saying what they’re really feeling or thinking, to spare the other hurt that isn’t theirs to spare; you’d think here, after so much extra time, after Clara’s chance to have the space to properly reflect on where her actions have got her, they’d actually kiss and makeup properly. The pair never had the slightest romantic interest in each other (at least not apart from the brief period when Matt Smith got oddly flirty) but their story arc feels like one of those sitcoms where you know they’re going to get together in the end so why don’t they just kiss before the last episode and get on with it – which then gets cancelled before the last episode pay-off. More than that, the Doctor's attempts to revive her make a mockery of all the tough lessons they both learned during their travels together: for her that trying to copy the Doctor without his many years of experience is futile; for him that even he has to give up control sometime and accept that not everything turns out the way he wants it to (it wasn't that long ago he learnt the lesson from Amy and Rory after all, while if I was, say, Adric or Katarina I'd be quite annoyed at the lengths the Doctor goes to in saving Clara when his response to those two was basically 'that's a shame, how I wish I could do something…Oh well'). As Ashildr says ‘It was sad and it was beautiful and it was over – you have no right to change who [Clara] was’. Exactly! Azbentium star to the impossibly old Viking in the corner there! ‘This has to stop – one of us has to go’ agrees the Doctor a few minutes later. ‘ot half’ says the audience ‘You’ve been doing this for three whole stories including most of this one – get on with it already!’ 

 More interesting is the sub-plot, low in the mix, about what grief has done to the Doctor and how far its stretched him. That is, after all, what the publicity and the cliffhanger both promised us, Moffat saying in Dr Who magazine that this story was ‘about’ the Doctor ‘losing his moral compass’. ‘If you really hacked him off, if you really got him angry and gave him nothing to fight for, what would you end up with?...An off-the-rails Doctor’. That sounds great: especially because the last time the Doctor was in this situation, in ‘The Waters Of Mars’, it was his big turning point, the realisation that grief had pushed him too far and his loneliness had made arrogant. What better thing to do with the return of the timelords returning than explore that angst, that anger at being ordered to fall in line when for so long you were the only being with the powers of time and a working Tardis, using them for what you saw as good over a race that used their power for selfish ends. The Doctor is at the peak of his arrogance and, tortured for billions of years, has just been poked with a big stick: he’s all too believable as the hybrid on paper and how much better it would be if he became the thing the timelords most feared because of the things they put him through! He should be a keg of dynamite waiting to explode at anyone who so much as looks at him funny in this story. Instead, that one still very uncharacteristic shooting aside (which the Doctor doesn’t so much as stop to regret) Capaldi barely fizzles, playing the Doctor more as a tired old man who just wants to eat his soup in peace. It’s a real lost opportunity, Moffat playing at what came so naturally to Davies and not quite understanding how feelings and plots work together (to be fair Davies has had his fair shares of failing to live up to Moffat: ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ is a fundamental misunderstanding of all of Moffat’s trademarks of playing with time and jump-scares). You ought to feel every reluctant step of the way in this story: the way the Doctor is pushed so far out of shape that he tries to sacrifice his own people a second time for the friend he loves, who hates him for it and the betrayal of everything he stands for. But the characters on this planet don’t seem real or worth getting worked up about, the saved friend barely has time to say she’s cross before taking matters into her own hands and the Doctor himself is an impenetrable wall it’s hard to read. What should have been an emotional cornerstone of the series, an episode to talk about for years to come, feels like a lot of huffing and puffing about nothing. I mean, Russell T said that he got rid of Gallifrey in order to rid the series of all the emotional baggage of the old days of people telling the Doctor what to do in funny hats; just like the John Nathan-Turner years this is a series of fan references, some from this era some from the very beginning, without much of a story to go with them. It’s ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’, without the Cybermen (or indeed the attack), lots of ideas from other scripts randomly stitched together to make a hybrid script. 

 Instead the episode becomes purely about how Clara survives, her revived form stealing a Tardis and heading off into infinity with Ashildr. Everyone happy: except the Doctor who in an inversion of what happened to Donna in ‘Journey’s End’ has lost all memory of her (another sign that Moffat tried to copy a Russell T writing trick and failed to understand why it worked in the first place). And except the audience, who seemed to be promised a very different better story. Moffat’s inbuilt intrinsic need to never ever ever give the audience what they expect has resulted in some of the best Dr Who stories over the years (who saw the plot to ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ coming?) but all too often it lets him down. It’s like with your shopping delivery (Cyber Mum’s gone to Ice World! Other grocery stores are available across time and space. Although I suspect the 9th and 10th Doctor shopped at ‘Wait, Rose’ ): occasionally you’ll get a substitute that you didn’t even know they made and find tastes better than what you ordered; more often than not, though, you’re just annoyed at the fact they’ve replaced your cream cake with a toothbrush when you don’t have any teeth. 

 That sounds a little harsh I know, as if I’m hell bent on hating this episode, but I don’t ever remember being so disappointed with an episode. I mean there are plenty of worse ones around, with full catalogues of errors in the writing, acting, directing and design departments. I mean, Capaldi’s gone to sleep again acting wise (he’s no god at playing simmering anger: just think what Hartnell, Ton Baker, Eccleston, Tennant or even McCoy would have brought to these lines), Jenna Coleman’s deliberately acting weird and Maisie Williams as Ashildr is still mis-cast as the being whose lived across time when she’s still clearly so inexperienced and some of Moffat’s dialogue is truly awful, another sign this was a rush job from a man looking forward to a Summer holiday whose just been told he’s been kept back for another year at school (I mean, ‘Nothing’s sad till it’s over – and then everything is’ surely ranks as his worst line, the 11th Doctor’s uncharacteristic lusting after Clara aside, closely followed by ‘‘every story ever told really happened’ – I mean if that’s true then I have some bad news about the forthcoming Agrosian invasions from my stories, although in the future series of Dr Who he/she/it regenerates into a squeaky Glabdihardit fluffball running around with a sonic vegetable peeler, so it’s not all bad). I mean, it’s not great by any means: nothing inspired everything tired as Moffat is on his last writing legs. Mostly though the basics are there: the return of the original Tardis design from 1963 is a thrill (courtesy of the leftover set from the superlative ‘Adventure In Space and Time’ drama from 2013. Roundels heaven! There’s even the un-chameleon circuit basic Tardises seen for the first time since ‘The War Games’ in 1969!), the little we see of Gallifrey is impressive, there are brief cameos for returning Daleks and Cybermen stuck inside the Matrix that add a frisson of danger, the cloister wraiths are a nice idea never properly developed (they look like shimmering chess pieces and walk like the slyther, though like many a Moffat monster they don’t actually do much in the end) and if they couldn’t tempt Dalton to come back again then Donald Sumpter makes for a fair Rassilon, with the gravitas needed for such a role (it’s a real shame we never got to see him square off against John Hurt’s similar War Doctor), returning to the series after playing Casali in ‘The Wheel In Space’, Commander Ridgeway in ‘The Sea Devils’ and Erasmus Darkening in one of the better ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ episodes ‘The Eternity Trap’. The story is stolen, though, by Ken Bones as The General – the male version of him at least. If you turn the sound down and simply watch the pictures, maybe making up your own story along the way, it looks great: the burnt scarred landscape of The Canary Islands, the dark shadowy sets of The Matrix and the sterilised white of the Tardis interior. With the sound on though, yikes: This is one of Murray Gold’s worst scores, all treacly emotion dictating how we feel usually about ten seconds ahead of the feeling it weirdly, which suggests either that the composer suddenly developed precognitive powers or something went haywire in the editing room), even though on screen the characters don’t appear to be feeling very much at all. I’m also not quite sure I buy the Doctor’s faltering attempts to play ‘Clara’s Theme’ on the guitar either (the only instance of the series’ incidental score ending up a plot point?) I mean, why would he? We’ve never seen him channel music before or since. Ever. And in 2024 that includes a musical episode in ‘The Devil’s Chord’ where that might have come in handy. 

 There are a few other bits and pieces that don’t quite work too. The Matrix looks interesting, as a scary maze, but it’s too close to what we had a whole episode of in ‘Heaven Sent’ and goes against everything we’ve ever seen before about the Matrix being a surreal imaginary worlds where anything can happen: this is just your shadowy things lurking round corners again. Moffat clearly chose the diner from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ as a bit of nostalgia for when it looked like this would be his swansong, but there’s absolutely no reason why Clara should have adopted her Tardis to look like it or be dressed as a 1950s waitress. If this were Amy then I could fudge the idea that the Tardis had picked this up from her subconscious – but this is Clara. As far as we know she’s never even been to America (she spends her first story ‘proper’ ‘The Belles Of St Johns’ with a book full of places she’s never visited with none ticked off. Was this plot point originally written for ‘Angels Take Manhattan’ and dropped?) The Doctor might have lost his memories but not his intelligence: he must know it’s unlikely to meet a human on Gallifrey, never mind one dressed as a 1950s waitress: even if his memory had truly been wiped of what Clara looked like you’d think he’d remember something about her. There’s technically nothing to stop the Doctor getting out some photograph albums from the Tardis store-room and going ‘hang on a mo…’ Unlike ‘Stolen Earth’ there’s no big awful thing that would happen if he did remember her anyway: they just know that they have to part and move on or be stuck in this cycle forever. Which is a bit different to poor Donna’s head exploding. Ashildr is definitely more interesting at the end of time than she was as an annoying Viking peasant or a confused highway robber, but all that time doesn’t seem to have changed her that much – certainly not enough to start giving the Doctor advice he really should have worked out for himself (equally neither seem that fussed about her setting a trap for him in ‘Raven’ – the Doctor looked like he was about to kill her in revenge the last time they met). At no time does the Doctor promise to look after Clara’s family, or her ex-pupils at Coal Hill School’; at no time does Clara worry about them or suggest to Ashildr to go back and visit them. Indeed putting those two together is a ridiculous idea: if the Doctor and Clara got each other into trouble that’s nothing on what this pair will probably do! Most of all though is the scene of the Doctor using a gun: no previous incarnation, even the 6th, would have shot a timelord for their own ends and cause them to regenerate - we know how much anguish the Doctor goes through every time it happens to him, but here's it’s just a gimmick to see one of them change gender. Regeneration isn’t just ‘man flu’ – it’s a traumatic process akin to death. Just lay this scene back to back with the 2nd Dr’s anger, the 3rd Doctor’s remorse, the 9th Doctor’s love or the 10th Doctor’s fear at turning into someone new and forgetting so much of who they used to be. And that’s usually what Moffat’s so good at, tidying away all the plotholes (well, ish) and answering every little issue (eventually…), but here, perhaps because the first draft at least was the last time he was expecting to have any threads to tease us with, the ball of string gets knotted and in a right old mess. Perhaps most of all, if the 'hybrid' is really such a famous myth on Gallifrey that everyone knows, how come no one's ever mentioned it before? Oh and after all that, after seeing how afraid Gallifrey is of the Doctor, they just let his Tardis land back on Gallifrey and let him wander off again? I don’t think so somehow. That’s the problem with hybrids you see, in plot terms at least: too many holes where the stitches are. 

The result is a story that, like ‘Dark Water-Death In Heaven’ ends a series on a bum note all round (though for very different reasons). Perhaps it’s biggest sin is how boring it all is: the second half especially makes you feel as if you’ve just spent 50 billion years trapped in a confession dial and while some Who stories by their very nature have to be dull to cover enough series arc plot points, this wasn’t one of them. I mean, just look at what was available for this story: a mad Doctor, a debate on whether life’s natural cycle is right to have a best before date, the Doctor being back amongst the kith and kin he thought he’d never ever see again and his ongoing debate as to whether he is a good man or not – when bringing back the one person who can answer that from the dead isn’t the clear-cut answer it ought to be. There’s enough in that lot to last an entire season and usually that’s what Moffat would have done (certainly there are hints in his other two 12th Doctor season arcs that all the stories fit together in some way). Not this one though: ‘Hell Bent’ feels simultaneously like a story tasked with far too much to do and a suicidal refusal to do any of it, choosing instead to ignore all of this potential for drama for a whole lot of sitting around talking. Not exactly hell then, as nothing goes spectacularly wrong, but uncomfortably close to purgatory. 

 POSITIVES + When the Doctor and Clara steal a Tardis the interior looks just like the 1st Doctor's did in 1963, re-created to the letter. I never thought I could get so attached to some round circles on a wall but that and the sequence that followed was really moving, the sense that the Doctor was repeating old cycles by fleeing his people and running away rather than stay and fight. The past really does live alongside the present on this show and it's lovely when the people making it remember and go to so much trouble with all the details 9well, mostly: they made the size of the doors to the wrong perspective so Capaldi was forever knocking himself out trying to duck through the door – see if you can spot the clever ways they avoid having him actually walk through it). It was a lovely touch bringing back the Sisterhood of Karn too, from the planet 'next door' to Gallifrey for their first appearance since ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ in 1976, a red button prequel aside, though again they didn't get much to do and were really more background colour than anything else (they really deserve a whole episode to themselves). 

 NEGATIVES - Oh no, not the 'half human' thing raising its multiple heads again! Even though it’s not anywhere near as bad as in the McGann TV movie and more something raised by Ashildr as an idea (already raised by some fans on internet forums) it still doesn't work and we all thought there’s been a pact never ever to mention it in the series again. personally I love it when Dr Who moves away from earthly boundaries to show how we’re really an infinitesimally small cog in a vast universe teaming with life – making us an important cosmic player (as ‘The Timeless Child’ arc also does) cheapens that and gives us overgrown chimpanzees with opposable thumbs ideas above our station we really don’t deserve. Everyone knows the Doctor hangs around here because it's easier on the budget rather than for any aesthetic reasons - if this show was real he'd be hanging round somewhere more interesting guaranteed, it doesn't really need to be explained away. 

 BEST QUOTE: The General: ‘A suggestion sir – we could talk to him’ Rassilon ‘Words are his weapons’ The General: ‘When did they stop being ours?’

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