#42 - Doctor Who - Hell Bent

It’s January and it’s time to correct a mistake with a review of Doctor Who’s series 9 finale, Hell Bent. Heaven Sent was a magnificent episode, featuring one of Capaldi’s greatest performances to date and was by the far the best episode of the series. What followed it was… it was bad, very bad and I was mistaken when I initially proclaimed it to be OK. Why have I changed my mind? Let’s take a look.

We open somewhere that isn’t Gallifrey, mistake number one. We’re actually in Nevada, in the USA because reasons I guess. I don’t care what’s going on in Nevada, I want to see Gallifrey goddammit! The Doctor went through like 3 billion years to get there, Gallifrey is what we want. The Doctor gets out of his pick up truck which he pulled out his ass to get into a diner where he’s met by Clara. He offers to play guitar in exchange for free food which might’ve worked if there were any customers to entertain, as it is, Clara agrees only because this setup requires her to.

His sonic sunglasses, one of the more stupid things they did in series 9, somehow connects his guitar so it can play through the radio without any cables. Setting 239582153-b then. His song is called Clara and Clara asks for more information. OK, now this set-up is over, can we get to Gallifrey now?

OK, opening titles, I still think they’re very good, moving on

Finally, we’re on Gallifrey and we see the Doctor walking through a desert outside the city of Arcadia for some time, mostly because we have screen time to fill. He stumbles upon the house from Day of the Doctor and Listen and walks towards it.

We cut to Arcadia where all the cloister bells are ringing. The General and Rassilon, who is now an old man are talking about the Doctor, The General talks to one of his guards who’s descended into the matrix, which was a computer last I checked and find the cloister wraiths are still active. The cloister wraiths are an interesting concept, shame they do jack sh*t in this episode.

For no reason whatsoever, the Sisterhood of Khan are on Gallifrey, they were last seen in the beginning of the season on their home planet. Why are they here? F*ck if I know, they give some excuse but it’s a cr*p one. The Doctor enters the barn and is discovered by… I have no f*cking clue. She gives him some soup on a table outside as some of the non-time-lord gallifreyans surround him.

A Time Lord gunship approaches and a voice tells the people to step away from the Doctor, they don’t. The Doctor steps forward, draws a line in the sand and heads back to his soup. The General recommends trying to talk with him. Rassilon argues that words are his weapon, although the general counters that they’re the weapons of all time-lords. You know what else is a good weapon? The ability to turn people into the stone with your mind whilst in a coma, shame we don’t know anyone who could do that… OH WAIT!

The general and an escort of guards come to meet with him, but he turns away. They communicate with Rassilon via wrist com and reminds them that he ‘won’ the time war. Yes, won. The Daleks are still terrorising the universe and as we’ll find out the Time Lords are in hiding at the end of the universe. There’s a victory for you. Next up several members of the high council greet him, he’s still not interested.

The leader of the sisterhood of Khan implies that the Doctor blames Rassilon for the horrors of the time war. Instead of the Daleks, remember Rassilon was revived during the war. Sure he had the f*cking stupidest plan of his life to end time and become a god that was stopped by a bullet but…

Anyway, Rassilon himself decides to greet the Doctor with a platoon of guards and the General, and then the most embarrassing exchange I’ve ever seen happens. The Doctor tells Rassilon to get off his planet and one by one everyone else tells him to, and he does so. What the hell happened to Rassilon? One of Gallifrey’s most powerful Time Lords has been turned into a joke. This was worse than his portrayal at the End of Time, and that’s really sad. Not only that but the Doctor somehow manages to call in military support to attack the President. This is insane!

The Doctor, because he can do whatever he f*cking wants now (*sigh*) decides to get rid of the High Council as well. The General tells the Doctor they’re at the end of the Universe, the Doctor says he knows, he came the long way round. OK, 2 problems 1) Heaven scent was a recursive loop episode, he should only have memories of the last loop, I know this because he spent the entire episode discovering the same sh*t over and over, that was the point and second, and this is a much bigger problem. He spent 4 and a half billion years in the confession dial, basically that means it’s about 4 and a half billion years in the future but in Utopia, which also took place at the end of the universe, that happened in the year 100 trillion! This isn’t the only major continuity error in this episode, there’s another major one coming up later.

OK, he talks to the Khan woman. I don’t know her name and I don’t care. The confession dial he was trapped in was meant to allow someone to make peace before death, not to serve as a torture chamber for the living. Rassilon apparently grew concerned about the coming of the hybrid, and the Doctor knew something so he trapped the Doctor. And as we’ll find out later that caused a causality loop that created the Hybrid, well done.

The hybrid was a recurring element of season 9, it was mentioned by Davros back in the opening and hybrids seemed to be cropping everywhere the entire season. Of course at the end of the last episode the Doctor revealed himself to be the hybrid, except there’s a problem, he isn’t or at least he wasn’t yet. OK, so the Doctor asks why they didn’t just ask him. Good question, is there a good answer? Nope of course there isn't, the general asks if he can just tell them. The Doctor doesn’t really know anything yet.

Anyway, we get this bullsh*t about prophecies on Gallifrey. Why do a species with direct access to the time-stream need prophecies? It was stupid in the End of Time, and it’s stupid here. Although, at least it came from a computer/room rather than a soothsayer. Anyway, all of them are saying that the Hybrid will stand in the ruins of Gallifrey, unweave time and break a billion hearts to heal his own.

He uses an extraction chamber to extract Clara from moments before her death. And here’s where this episode goes off the rails. OK, I’m just gonna spoil it now. The Doctor is doing all of this to save Clara but her death is a fixed point and time unravels around it. Problem, Clara is an uninteresting boring companion, I don’t like her at all and she’s spent the entire season trying to be the Doctor, which is irritating. Her death, whilst somewhat generic was also a powerful reminder that only the Doctor can be the Doctor. 

I’ll get back to that, what matters right now is Clara is not the first companion that has died. There are 6 other companions that died during the show, sure one of them was a shape-shifting android but that’s beside the point. You don’t see the Doctor doing this to save Adric (I personally consider Clara more annoying than Adric, at least his personality was somewhat consistent) hell, he moved on from that so quickly it’s hardly mentioned past the next episode. You don’t see the Doctor tearing down the walls of reality to save Rose, who he loved to an extent I’ve never seen between Capaldi and Clara.

You don’t see 11^th trying to save Brigadier Allison Gordon Lethbridge Stewart or breaking time itself to save Amy and Rory from the weeping angels. So why is he so hell bent on bringing Clara back? (And yes, I realise what the title is a reference to.) Anyway, this is the crux of the remaining story-line, Gallifrey may as well be a background element.

So bla bla bla, The General says she’ll have to return but the Doctor draws a gun on him, he shoots him and he regenerates into a female and somehow skips out the usual post-regeneration bits and is completely fine. That was apparently her first male regeneration. The Doctor asks for a human compatible neural block for a point that is a) a major plot point and b) a major plot hole. I’ll explain later.

They head into the cloister chamber, which is dark, creepy and full of monsters. This is where Moffat would usually build up some atmosphere instead it’s cameos. Question, when did Cybermen or Weeping Angels ever make it to the Time Lord Capital? Sure, there were Cybermen in the death zone but a) that’s miles away and b) not that design of Cyberman.

OK, I keep skipping this but they keep cutting back to the diner in a manner that’s both pointless and distracting. I’ll explain what the neural block’s for in the minute, it’s another major problem with the episode. So, the Cloister wraiths would only attack the two if they attempt to leave. They’re basically pointless.

There is a secret exit that if they find, the Cloister wraiths will let them go, the Doctor has done this before. How convenient. Clara tries to find out what happened to him but he’s keeping his cards close to his chest about how long he was kept. From his perspective not that long, like I said, it was a recursive loop. Moffat, you wrote the last episode, you should know this. Clara whispers something into the Doctor’s ear as we draw out to a completely pointless shot of Arcadia for no reason. She confronts the Time Lords and calls them horrible people for putting the Doctor through all that.

They demand to know what she told him and amongst other things she said she’ll serve as a distraction whilst he makes the escape through the tunnel and picks up a new TARDIS. Clara on the other hand is still stuck between her final two heartbeats. He flies further towards the end of the universe to avoid them being tracked. He heads outside alone and discovers. Oh, sh*t it’s Ashildr. This character started off irritating, got interesting then got even more irritating. And no, I’m not going to call her ‘me’ because f*ck that.

Ashildr is even more immortal than Captain Jack. What is the Doctor even here for exactly? Why is talking to Ashildr. Ashildr is just giving him a lecture. She gives some ideas on what the hybrid could be. It could be her, but it’s unlikely, it could be that theory from the Doctor Who TV movie from Paul McGann that few people liked. Ashildr also theorises that the hybrid is actually 2 people, the Doctor and Clara.

For some reason he explains to Ashildr that he plans to use the neural block to wipe Clara’s memories of him. OK, let’s get to this bullsh*t right now. You want to know when the Doctor’s natural telepathy was used first in modern Doctor Who, The Girl in the Fireplace by STEVEN MOFFAT, in the finale of season 4, journey’s end, he used the natural telepathy to do this exact thing to Donna. In fact, he even mentions it in this episode. So, I have to ask, why doesn’t he just do that here? Well, it’s because the plot says Clara can not only operate the sonic sunglasses but use setting 1222948-b to reverse the polarity so it would wipe the Doctor’s memories of Clara instead. And yes, that’s how it happens. I’m skipping through this so we can draw this to a close.

OK, so we cut back to the Diner, he knows he had a companion named Clara, and that they went on adventures but doesn’t know what she looks or sounds like. Turns out the Diner is the stolen TARDIS which Ashildr can now pilot somehow but is stuck looking like a Diner so they can have end sequence which looks like it’s from To Boldly Flee (Film Brain even made a gif of that) The Doctor receives his TARDIS which still had the memorial picture of Clara on it, so the Doctor should now know what she looked like. Clara is going back to Gallifrey to die but is willing to take a few detours first. The Doctor receives a new sonic screwdriver which has stupid flashy lights on it (by now, £39.99) and this episode draws to merciful end.

In my initial review I said this episode wasn’t bad enough to be considered bad, in hindsight boy was I wrong.

What the f*ck was this episode? Clara’s ending is now the complete opposite of what Face the Raven tried to achieve. Now Clara basically is the Doctor, travelling through time with a companion in a TARDIS

The return of Gallifrey was a footnote in what should’ve been a powerful return home and then we have the major plot-hole of why a neural block is somehow better than natural telepathy. This episode sucks, I’ll give it some props for nice visuals but nice visuals don’t outshine an abysmal finale which had some really promising build up.

Rage Rating 30%

Images/clips used in this review are from Doctor Who and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use