Hell Bent: The Doctor Goes Home to Gallifrey

After the almost perfect Heaven Sent, “Hell Bent” had a very hard act to follow, and I’ll be honest, it didn’t manage it. Personally I didn’t like this one as much as the previous episode, and perhaps surprisingly, given how the Christmas specials have gone lately, I didn’t like it nearly as much as The Husbands of River Song either. It’s the Series 9 finale, and it’s got Gallifrey in it, which is something I’ve been waiting years to see properly. There are some good ideas in here and a few great moments. But it spends most of its energy on something I didn’t want it to do, and that’s taken the shine off it for me.

It opens in a diner in the middle of the Nevada desert, with the Doctor strumming his guitar, which has been a running thread all series. The waitress turns out to be Clara, which was a real surprise, as I thought we’d said goodbye to her for good in Face the Raven. What’s odd is that the Doctor seems strangely unmoved to see her, after everything he went through in Heaven Sent to get back to her. The reason only becomes clear as he tells her the story of how he got there, and it’s a clever way of framing the whole episode. I didn’t work out why he was behaving that way until much later on.

Gallifrey, finally

Then we get to Gallifrey, and I have to admit it wasn’t what I’d pictured. I’d always imagined the Time Lords’ home as a technological marvel, something like a planet-wide mega-city, and what we get is a dust bowl, a barn in the middle of a desert and one futuristic city in the distance. I get that the barn has history for the Doctor, but it made the most advanced civilisation in the universe look oddly backward. That said, the stand-off that follows is terrific. The Doctor simply sits in the barn and refuses to engage, and one by one the soldiers sent to bring him in lay down their weapons and side with him. I really liked that the ordinary soldiers and citizens of Gallifrey see him as a hero, even if the Time Lords think he’s a troublemaker.

He ends up throwing the Lord President off the planet, which is very satisfying, and the Time Lords give him everything he asks for. There are some good bits of business along the way. The General regenerating from a white man into a black woman, with a throwaway line about her having been a woman before, is a lovely touch, and I liked it a lot. The sonic screwdriver is back too, and thank goodness they’ve finally got rid of those stupid sonic sunglasses. What I didn’t like was the Doctor shooting the General to get what he wanted, even if the regeneration was cool, because it’s so far out of character for him.

The Lord President, by the way, is Rassilon himself, the founder of Time Lord society and the villain of The End of Time, and he gets remarkably little to do. The Doctor simply stares him down and has him exiled, and that’s the last we see of him. I understand the story isn’t really about Time Lord politics, but it’s strange to bring back the most powerful figure in Gallifrey’s history and then get rid of him in a couple of scenes. It’s typical of how the episode treats Gallifrey in general, as somewhere to pass through on the way to Clara rather than somewhere worth exploring. After waiting this long to see it, I wanted more.

Bringing Clara back

This is the real problem for me. The Doctor uses Time Lord technology to pull Clara out of time in the seconds before her death, and the whole finale becomes about him trying to cheat that death. Her death is a fixed point, so he can’t really change it, but he tries anyway, and the Time Lords are terrified of what he’ll do. The Hybrid that the series has been teasing all year turns out not to be a creature at all but the Doctor and Clara together, each pushing the other to terrifying extremes. That’s a neat idea. I just wish the episode had spent more time on it and less on keeping Clara alive.

To keep her alive, the Doctor steals a TARDIS and runs with Clara to the very end of the universe, where the only person left is Me, the immortal girl we met as Ashildr. The ruins, the dying stars and the two of them sitting in what’s left of the Cloisters look gorgeous, and Maisie Williams is as good as ever. Their conversation about the Hybrid is where the big idea is actually explained, and it’s the best-written scene in the finale. It’s also the moment the Doctor has to face what he’s done to get here. I just wish the rest of the episode had been as thoughtful as those few minutes.

Where it lost me

The ending tries to square it. The Doctor plans to wipe Clara’s memories of him to keep her safe, she reverses the device, and he loses his memories of her instead. Clara then flies off in her own TARDIS, still stuck in the shape of the diner, with Me, to have adventures of her own before she eventually has to go back to her death. I didn’t understand how Me is still around at the end of the universe when the chip that made her immortal came from the Mire, who clearly weren’t. The Cloisters and the archives didn’t make much sense to me either.

But the thing I really couldn’t get past is that Clara came back at all. When a companion leaves, it should hurt, for the Doctor and for us. Saying goodbye to Rose in Doomsday hurt. Saying farewell to Donna in Journey’s End was just tragic, and Amy and Rory in The Angels Take Manhattan was a proper ouch. Clara’s death in Face the Raven was complete, and then she was gone, and now she’s not. It feels like cheating, and it robbed that ending of everything it had earned.

Rating: 3/5. It’s ok. The stand-off in the barn is great, the Hybrid reveal is a good idea and there are some lovely moments along the way, but Gallifrey looks strangely backward and the episode spends far too long undoing a death that should have stayed done. After a series this strong, that’s a disappointing way to finish.