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Review: Hell Bent…
Naturally, there are spoilers ahead…
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Before I get into my more reasoned reaction to the Season Finale, lets talk visceral.
This is what I wrote right after watching the episode yesterday:
AARGHH!
Clara Lives…Moffat’s is the one who’s cruel and cowardly.
He ruined “Face The Raven”. Made it cheap, taudry and manipulative.
Series 9. A magnificent marathon destined to win the Triple Crown of Season Arc Storied Horse racing only to come up lame in the last 10 yards. Such a pity.
I am very angry with you Steven. Very angry indeed!
Another fake Clara Death.
F*ck The Raven….
I have calmed down quite a bit since then (about 12 hours later) and I have a much better opinion of this episode in the end once the emotions have calmed down.
It is actually a good episode. Series 9/35 is one of the best seasons in many years. It is a classic of its own.
But,it was a bit like watch the “Planet of The Apes” Tim Burton remake and you get to that idiotic last 5 minutes that ruined the movie. That was the visceral reaction I had to Time-Locked Undead Clara and Ashildr/Me running off into the universe together.
Fortunately, upon reflection I have a better consideration for this episode, and the last 5 minutes of “Planet of The Apes” STILL sucks. 🙂
The Doctor Clara and her companion, the immortal Me. Off to see the universe.
Is this what the Doctor and The Master would have been like if things had turned out differently? Hmmm…
That’s where the rumors of Me being a companion in The TARDIS obviously come from.
Doctor Clara gets the Hartnell TARDIS.
The visceral reaction is gone. I went too far… 🙂
But do the Time Lords REALLY want to risk having the Hybrid, aka Clara & The Doctor rekindle at some point in the future?
And what happens when Clara and Me meet Jenny?
The mind boggeleth.
Overall, the episode is very good. The Doctor literally broke all the rules and went literally to the end of time to save Clara.
But I still think it cheapened “Face The Raven” and gave us YET ANOTHER Fake Clara Death. I’m so sick of that. That visceral reaction hasn’t gone away. 🙂
The Doctor did break every rule he ever believed in. He was cruel. He was cowardly and he wasn’t The Doctor.
And Moffat got another Gender Change thrown in for sledgehammer effect. Sigh…Unnecessary.
The opening in the diner made me want to scream “MOFFAT!” but I kept it together because the story was actually very good- I just hated that one part- viscerally. 🙂
The Doctor drawing a line in the sand (Wish our President had that much resolution) at his childhood home, Lungbarrow.
The escalation of fear from Time Lords where you get one Chancellery Guard, to the Head of the Guard and several, to The High Council and finally Rassilon himself was very interesting to watch as the fear of the unknown was ratcheted up.
Too bad Rassilon forgot to take his own advice about “immortality is a curse not a blessing” and has gone mad himself and lead Gallifrey and The Universe to the brink of extinction in The Time War.
A Time Lord Victorious.
Now, he wants The Doctor. He “was a good man once” also but fear and death have overtaken him as well.
“Get off his Planet”. So does this mean The Doctor’s The President yet again, and he ran off in a TARDIS instead?
The Doctor is a “War Hero” He won the Time War. Yeah, he committed genocide of both sides and then undid it. 🙂
Rassilon fought it. The Doctor Won it.
Maybe they aren’t so dissimilar.
The Doctor was the one that beat The Death Zone, a playground for the Time Lords to torture other beings in.
They just tortured him for 4.5 billion years because they feared his incite into The Hybrid that would destroy Gallifrey, which the Time Lords naturally consider it to be a melding of the two great races of the universe- The Time Lords and The Daleks because they are the most powerful and most feared.
But it’s the deadly combo of a Time Lord, and a lowly Human who wants to be a Time Lord.
The Doctor & Clara, brought together by that ultimate lover of all things chaos, The Master/Missy. Also, he’s best friend. The Light and Dark in all of us.
Clara and Ashildr.
What does this say about the Cartmel MasterPlan that never finished because of the shows cancellation? The one where Ace was going to become a Time Lord on Gallifrey? 🙂
What does that say about the potentially deadly cocktail of Doctor and Companion for the future?
Peter Capaldi, over these last few episodes, has shown why he is magnificent actor and deserves to be one of the greatest. He oozes resolute menace like no Doctor ever has.
The episode itself is full of visceral reactions and elicits them also.
He “goes too far” and there is Clara, and Ashildr to stomp him back into being a Doctor.
The Time Lord Victorious, indeed. A wounded animal, acting on raw emotions and grief more like.
He’s willing to do literally anything to save her. He literally risks the fabric of time & space itself.
And The Time Lords let him because they are giving into their own fears.What could Clara actually tell them about the Hybrid? I mean really, what could she?
“Why would you even do that?” she asks him, crying, when she learns just how long it’s been since they last met, a heartbeat ago. “I was dead and gone. Why would you even do that to yourself?”
“I had a duty of care,” he says, repeating a phrase he’s uttered before.
It’s sweet and alarming. How far and how bad can things get if you “care” too much? Actually, given his knowledge of time, fixed points and the fallout of violations, it’s mostly alarming how far he’s gone and seems willing to go.
He has literally risked the Universe for her.
But she can talk him off his Time Lord Victorious Ledge and tell him to “Be a Doctor” before he effectively wipes his own memory.
It’s the reverse Donna. He forgets her, instead of her forgetting him OR DYING for real.
When did we become immune to seeing people die, for real?
But I did a fangasm when He steals a TARDIS and runs! Only this time, he takes Clara with him. And it’s an overlit (as it was back in the day) mockup of the First Doctor’s TARDIS with the original Hartnell console from An Adventure in Space & Time standing in for the original.
The Doctor has come full circle.
He’s running away from Gallifrey, afraid and scared, in a TARDIS but it’s not his grand daughter this time.
And via the Mind Clara in the Diner he become the Doctor Reborn with a new Sonic Screwdriver.
And the adventure continues. A new Companion. A New Direction.
Run you Clever Girl, and Remember.
She is now more Impossible that ever. She was born to save The Doctor, after all, even from himself.
Run you clever Doctor, and forget.
He doesn’t like endings, after all.
“stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten.”
A Man is the sum of his memories, you know, a Time Lord Even more so…:)
TEGAN: It’ll soon be goodbye, then.
DOCTOR 5: Will it?
TURLOUGH: Well, you’re off to Gallifrey to be President. I suppose your Time Lord subjects will find a Tardis that really works and get us both home?
DOCTOR 5: Who said anything about Gallifrey?
TURLOUGH: You told Chancellor Flavia
DOCTOR 5: I told her she had full deputy powers until I returned.
TEGAN: You’re not going back?
DOCTOR 5: You know, sometimes, Tegan, you take my breath away.
TURLOUGH: Er, won’t the Time Lords be very angry?
DOCTOR 5: Furious.
TEGAN: You mean you’re deliberately choosing to go on the run from your own people in a rackety old Tardis?
DOCTOR 5: Why not? After all, that’s how it all started.
But first, he has to meet his wife again…
19 Days Until Christmas. Then we are in for a long winters nap.
The Elephant in the Room
Ok, I tried to avoid it. But it’s everywhere. So here goes.
Now ask me if I believe it?
Nope.
Not until you show me physically the evidence.
For one thing, 106 just happens to be how many episodes are missing in total.
Now what are the chance that you find ALL the missing episodes in one go?
Lottery Ticket, anyone?
But Troughton was never sold to Ethiopia as far as I could tell so I think this is being over-hyped.
Do I hope for a few new ones, ABSOLUTELY. But ALL of them, no sorry, not going to believe that one.
So it’s wish fulfillment on the eve of the 50th Anniversary.
And possibly a very cruel one.
The Sunday Mirror quotes a BBC source:
Yep, they freely attributed that rentaquote to someone from the BBC (rather than making it up, as it is based on the bleeding obvious.) (Kasterborous.com)
Couldn’t agree more.
Can you spot the inconsistency in the stories that make a cynic like me go hmmm?
BBC Worldwide will put the previously lost episodes from different stories – both believed to be from the Patrick Troughton era – for sale on digital platforms such as iTunes from Wednesday, RadioTimes.com understands.
So are they negotiating or did they already gte them back some time ago because undoubtedly they would need to be cleaned up.
I saw the raw footage from the last 2 episodes recovered at the Doctor Who Convention in Cardiff in 2012 and they were VERY rough. Scratches, holes, audio and video drops. It was kinda ugly.
So you can see where my skepticism comes from.
After all in the same radio times article: A BBC Worldwide spokesman refused to officially confirm the discovery or the “speculation” around further missing episodes.
So a “source” confirms it an “spokesman” denies it.
So it could all be a gigantic prank?? Or it could be over-hyped.
I don’t know which it is yet. But do I believe it’s genuine?
But do I believe the reports??
No.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 6 million times over the last 30 years, shame on me.
Sorry, but I’m going to go with an old Ronald Reagan line, “Line but verify” and I don’t really trust to begin with.
How about you?
A Terrible Choice
Quite a part of from the fact that both a future companion (Amy Pond) and a Future Doctor (Peter Capaldi) are in this episode there is the bigger question of changing history.
A question that goes back as far as the show itself.
To fire itself even.
In the very first story, An Unearthly Child the Doctor is an power struggle between cavemen for fire.
This has vacillated between, “not one word” as The First Doctor said in The Aztecs to more modern times where it comes down to the Doctor saying he knows when to meddle and not on “A Fixed point in time”.
But even then it’s not so straight forward as we saw in Season 6 when The Doctor was “killed” in the first episode.
(If you haven’t seen Series VI…SPOILERS…:) )
Only to find out it was a Tessalector Robot. Which raises all kinds of questions about his non-death at the hands of river and the running of all time together. But that’s fall under “timey wimey” and will give you a headache trying to reconcile the inconsistencies.
So when is a “fixed point” not a fixed point. When it’s good for the story and does not bog down the narrative.
I.e. fan favourite Harriet Jones, she was supposed to be a PM that ushered in a New Golden Age (9th Doctor) – “the architect of Britain’s Golden Age“–but when she uses Torchwood to destroy the Sycorax, the Doctor destroys her future as Prime Minister.
Enter Harold Saxon, aka the Master.
Whoops! 🙂
The Wedding of River Song is a cracking could Sci-FI story, just don’t try to hard to make it make logical and conical consistent sense.
But back to History.
The Fires of Pompeii is also like the movie Titanic you know the ending. Everyone knows the ending.
What you do in the mean time is makes of breaks it.
The Doctor and Donna arrive in a new Roman town only to discover it’s Pompeii and Volcano Day is tomorrow!
This presents a dilemma.
Donna, being the normal human wants to save them.
The Doctor knows they must die for history to be correct.
Then you thrown in aliens and the further dilemma that The Doctor must cause the eruption himself and I think you have a much better episode.
The Doctor has been doing this kind of thing in “historical” episodes before, mostly in the William Hartnell first Doctor era.
“Fixed Points” in the future are not as meaty as ones we all can relate to.
Like the Aztecs.
Barbara trying to change the Aztec culture. The Doctor saying you can’t.
And in the end human nature wins out and nothing is changed.
The Aztecs I have always felt was the best Hartnell episode. It has a lot of depth (just ignore the painted backgrounds) in the story and lots of conflict for the characters. It explores the early “ground rules” for the series that will later be broken.
Another one like it, but as highly regarded is The Space Museum where we get a story that starts in a similar vein to The Impossible Astronaut where The Doctor and company arrive at a Museum and find themselves on display!
How can that be and can it be changed? Should they change it??
Now that’s the kind of thing I like about WHO.
Karen Gillan:
Peter Capaldi:
Bonus:
MY Doctor Who 