Hell Bent

The series finale of Doctor Who, Hell Bent, is all set on his home planet of Gallifrey which, as a serious Doctor Who fanatic, should be Manna from Heaven. Except, I’ve never really been that bothered about the Time Lord mythology behind the series. I much prefer that there is an element of mystery about the central character and the big reveal of 1969’s War Games about the Doctor’s origins is as much as I really need or want to know – I would much rather that he was this mysterious traveller that ended up getting into scrapes with Daleks or whatever. In a similar way, I was never that bothered about the internal Federation politics in Star Trek; I much preferred it when the Captain was picking a fight with Klingons.

Hell Bent actually brings us to the climax of a trilogy of episodes with Clara getting her comeuppance in Face The Raven and the Doctor being trapped in a riddle of a prison in Heaven Sent (which I watched again in the week and, if anything, gets even better on a second viewing.) Now we get Clara back in pretty much the first scene (and the last one as well) but quite how we get to that point turns out to be rather interesting. In fact I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing as I had seen a couple of spoiler-free previews that were less than enthusiastic.

As for the Gallifrey thing it was really the opposite of what I had feared. Rather than dwelling on the shows own internal mythos it was, in fact, closing many of the threads that were dangling from Matt Smith’s last series. I am wondering whether these stories were meant to have been used for Matt’s Doctor if he had done a forth series – sadly we will never know. What I had expected was something like The Deadly Assassin which is regarded as an all-time classic but which never really appealed to me other than the Master’s face rotting off. That seemed to dwell heavily on Timlord backstory but with Hell Bent we have Gallifrey as a backdrop with a few loose ends tied up and the Doctor is away again.

One of the tropes of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who stories is that he never seems to be able to let a character die and this is also true of Clara. However, the device he uses here of salvaging her last moment of life and then wiping the Doctors memory of her (the inverse Donna effect) is really required for the series to progress. Her original story was the “Impossible Girl” arc in which she is meant to have been a ghostly figure in the Doctor’s timeline: always there but never spotted. By wiping the Doctor’s memory she is able to return as that ghostly presence whilst the Doctor can move on to bigger and better things.

There were lots of other little things with the episode that I loved. Seeing the original 1960s TARDIS interior again (complete with wobbly doors) was a great nod to the show's past as was the Doctor’s guitar: I originally thought this was a Gibson SG but on closer inspection it was actually the budget Epiphone version – apparently Doctor Who’s budget still harks back to the 1960s as well! It’s worth noting, too, the total running time of the three-part series finale. In terms of the classic series this would have clocked in as a 7 part story which we haven’t seen since the 1970 adventure Inferno (well, as long as one discounts the linked Trial of a Timelord series which I strongly advise most people to do).

So what of the series overall? Back in September when it started I was feeling surprisingly uninspired: not unenthusiastic, exactly, but not waiting with baited breath either. As the series has progressed I’ve been cursing the tardiness of the week that brings us Saturday night more and more - even being tempted to poke around fan forums for snippets (not that the BBC haven’t done a sterling job in feeding huge great spoilers anyway). I really enjoyed last year’s series; the return to a single long run has helped no end. But two factors have really propelled this year’s series forward: the return to a long format multi-part story has allowed the scripts room to breathe and really allowed the lead actors to develop the dramatic potential of the stories; and secondly the fact that both the lead actors were known to the writers has meant that the scripts are finely tuned to the traits of the main characters. As I mused back in September: it is often the lead actor’s second series where they really make their mark.

If I had to pick a single episode that I liked the best it would without a doubt be Heaven Sent even though half a dozen of the other episodes would be up amongst my favourites. If there was a low point I’d probably go for Sleep No More but I’m still undecided as to whether that was meant to be an actual adventure or a meta-Who episode: I think they missed a trick with this one by not showing it as a Halloween special – that would have swapped it with the Zygon story and made for a more balanced series. That’s nit-picking, though, and I would otherwise find it hard to fault this run. Of course, we still have the Christmas special to come in just under three weeks: The Husbands of River Song. I’m a little weary of where that one is going but I thought that about last year’s festive episode, Last Christmas, and that turned out to be something of a classic.