Hell Bent

Chapter The 239th, the interminable conversation at the end of the universe. 

Plot:

The Doctor is imprisoned by the Time Lords for many billions of years, to force him to spill all he knows about a prophecy regarding 'the Hybrid' that's going to destroy the web of time. He resists and eventually breaks out; finding himself in the wilds of Gallifrey, he makes his way back to the barn where he lived as a child. Lord President Rassilon confronts him there, but the Doctor is supported by the Gallifreyan troops as a hero of the Time War, and Rassilon is banished. The vengeful Doctor says this is still not enough for him, but he doesn't actually do anything else against the Time Lords. Instead, he asks that Clara be extracted from time just before her raven death, as she has information about the Hybrid. It's just a ploy to bring her back to life, though, and he then plans to wipe her memories of him. They escape into the cloisters - I'd explain what they are, but nothing really happens there, even though they're supposed to be significant and scary - and capture a TARDIS. They travel to a reality bubble at the end of the universe, and the Doctor meets Ashildr / Me and has a conversation about what the Hybrid could be. They don't come to a conclusion: it could be Ashildr, the Doctor himself, or a combination of him and Clara. When the Doctor attempts to wipe Clara's memory with a Time Lord gizmo, Clara explains that she has reversed the polarity. It's a fifty-fifty chance which one of them will get the memory wipe, but they both go for it, and it's the Doctor that loses his memories of Clara. She pilots the TARDIS back to Earth, leaving the Doctor with his TARDIS. She then goes off with Ashildr in the other one for adventures in time and space, saying that she'll eventually go back to face her fate. The three contenders for being the hybrid are therefore still on the loose, but the unravelling of the web of time and destruction of millions doesn't happen. The Doctor creates himself a new sonic screwdriver.

Context:

As related in in the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post, the family were planning a holiday abroad for the first time since 2019. It was all a bit last minute, but we finally found a package deal for a stay in a resort on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura. As is something of a tradition, I then mused on what Doctor Who story I would take with me downloaded onto a device, to watch on the plane or on a quiet evening when away. I didn't think any filming had been done on Fuerteventura, so was surprised when I googled it and found that there had been three separate stories in Peter Capaldi's era that included footage shot there. This, and other revelations about just how many times Doctor Who had done overseas filming to which I'd not paid much heed prompted the content for that Deeper Thoughts section of Asylum of the Daleks, and meant that I could pick a story with a strong connection to my destination (assuming I hadn't blogged all three already). The three stories were The Zygon Invasion / Inversion, Heaven Sent (but just the bit at the end), and - the luckily still unblogged - Hell Bent. The location was used to depict the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey, and it was obviously exciting for a fan such as me to visit there (kind-of). In the end, I watched it on my phone on the second evening away, once everyone else had turned in for the night.

First Time Round:

I watched Hell Bent for the first time on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast, Saturday 5th December 2015, time-shifted to later in the evening, reviewing it (alone, I think) for suitability for the younger of my children; it was judged as suitable, and then watched again on the Sunday morning with the full fam accompanying me. It was the final story of that year's series, which was the first run of Doctor Who episodes to be shown after I started this blog earlier in the year. As such, I have an online diary from around that time to refer back to, sort-of: in the blog post for The Underwater Menace published a little after, I described how in Hell Bent writer Steven Moffat had "...staged a spectacular finale, returning to Gallifrey and presenting a moral quandary about how far one should go to save a friend" but that my two boys (aged 9 and 6 at the time) only remembered it two weeks on "because there was a new sonic screwdriver revealed at the end". I remember this, but think I might have been summarising the show a little more grandly than my actual feelings for it might have dictated, to make the joke of my children's single take-away work better. I remember thinking it was okay, but a bit of a come-down after Heaven Sent, which was my favourite story of the year. Before this re-watch, I noticed that the episode was an hour long and struggled to recall enough incident from the story that could have filled up this extended running time: there was a Western-style stand off, there was a bit where the Doctor and Clara are running around weird catacombs of some kind, there was a conversation with the Ashildr / Me character than I found a bit insufferable... a scene or two in an American diner, also? What else? Were there any monsters in it, aside from cameos? I was coming up blank. The story had not left much of an impression, but maybe - as I speculated in my Face The Raven blog post earlier this year - I might change my position after this viewing.

Reaction:

Reader, I did not change my position after this viewing, except maybe a little for the worse. When the classic series visited the Doctor's home planet, the first couple of times were special and exciting, but the more often various production teams dipped in to that same well, the more the returns precipitately diminished. At some level, the production teams for the new series must have understood this, as the planet was kept offscreen for long stretches, with the narrative explanations given ranging from it being time-locked, presumed destroyed, actually destroyed, or hidden off in another dimension. Nonetheless, post 2005 the temptation was there, and Gallifrey and Time Lords eventually featured. Thereafter, the new series followed the same pattern as the old. Big stories like David Tennant's swansong and the 50th anniversary story brought back the Doctor's planet and people in their handsome but impractical collars. At the end of the second of those stories, though, a decision was made. The Doctor discovers that his planet still exists out in space/time somewhere, and that he did not cause its destruction after all - hooray, he's not got that sadness and guilt anymore; but, he's going to go out there and find it. Hmm. That made a nice ending to The Day of the Doctor from an emotional and character sense, but probably was a mistake in terms of the long-running series plot arc. I half expected (hoped?) it would be dropped with only vague mentions on occasion thereafter, but it wasn't. Gallifrey was back by the very next story, and the search for its physical location was a theme for the following series. Things came to a ridiculously collared head with Capaldi's second season that finished with Hell Bent - the whole year's run was about the intricate workings of Timelord mythos.

The trouble is, none of this mythology is particularly interesting. The people of Gallifrey are not very interesting.  Rassilon's confrontation with the Doctor doesn't feel that tense; there's never any threat as their face-off is in the first fifteen minutes of a big finale, not the last fifteen. From the character point of view, it doesn't make much sense either. The Doctor has one plan on Gallifrey, and it's to engineer Clara's extraction from time so she can cheat death, so why waste time hiding out and waiting for Rassilon to turn up, just so the Doctor can humiliate the Lord President? He's bitter about Clara's death and his imprisonment, no doubt, but that isn't so great a look. The Doctor's been thinking about what he'll do for billions of years (in Heaven Sent it is explicitly stated that he can eventually remember all the time he spent trapped, at some point in each cycle of his imprisonment) and the best he can come up with is vengeance and cheating? I know it's kind of the point that he's forgetting himself and acting outside his usual ethical code, but it doesn't come over in a convincing way. Capaldi plays it so stoically, doing the retired gunslinger coming out of retirement bit without any speech or betrayal of emotion, when it really needs a roaring and raging and petulant performance for his betrayal of his principles to land with the audience (like Tennant in The Waters of Mars, or Matt Smith in A Good Man Goes to War). The script and direction both portray his actions as heroic in that moment, so any hand-wringing later about his being cruel or cowardly won't wash. He doesn't follow through anyway; once he leaves Gallifrey partway through this story, I don't think he so much as mentions the place again, and he's certainly not in any hurry to return there and sort out any remaining business; he clearly wasn't that impacted by the Time Lords' machinations.

The Sisterhood of Karn are not very interesting; they don't have anything to do. Poor Veronica Roberts as Ohila just gets to do thankless feed lines and exposition throughout. Ashildr  / Me is not very interesting, and Maisie Williams's performance is just not strong enough. The cloisters are not very interesting: they're talked up as a hugely dangerous place where you'll get attacked and driven mad, but the Doctor and Clara are in there for simply ages and nothing happens to them at all. The cloister wraiths are nice visually, but are just for show as they don't do anything that impacts the plot one jot. The prophecy about the Hybrid is so abstruse that it can't be interesting. It's just not tangible enough to ever seem threatening to anyone. Something born of two warrior races will come along to destroy Gallifrey and time itself, blah, blah, blah. But we never see any of this happen, it's only talked about. It's also hard to get too bothered about the threat of a universally destructive force, when the story takes place at the end of the universe when nobody but a few Time Lords and immortals are left alive anyway. This is the fundamental flaw of Hell Bent, it's not a threat to Earth or humans or anyone with whom the audience can identify. The most grounded character is a ghost, and the most grounded location is a mystical diner out in the desert, which then vanishes. If one is alienated by this, all one can see is a lot of strange people in silly outfits spouting overcomplicated techno babble. Even if one can identify with the characters somehow, there's then the confusing matter of timing. Why are these activities, including the build up with the death of Clara, happening now? The prophecy is old and so important that it's part of the reason that the Doctor left Gallifrey when he was William Hartnell, and it keeps the fearsome Rassilon himself up at night, but it's not been mentioned before in 50+ years of the programme, and it's never touched on again. What changed to make it suddenly become relevant for this brief period?

Some will be thinking I've missed the point of the story, that it's all about Doctor's and Clara's care for one another, and the emotion of it comes from the sadness of their final parting. The trouble is, they've already done the sadness and parting two stories earlier, when the character died, but it's undercut by her being back alive and even breathing (out of habit) a short while later. There's a nice moment between them in the cloisters where she realises the extent of his sacrifice, spending billions of years imprisoned, but it's very brief. The coy moment a la Lost in Translation where they exchange heartfelt words but the audience doesn't get to hear them is a cop out. There was nothing that Moffat could have written that wasn't a rerun of similar moments they've had before, and not just in this series. There's emotional scenes between them throughout her time (e.g. The Name of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor) and lots of fake goodbyes (e.g. Death in Heaven, Last Christmas). This is also a character that was conceived to die over and over again. To be a convincing final end, it would have to be explosively grand and sweepingly dramatic, but it's just small and quiet. There's no heroism as there's no threat. The nearest is when Clara distracts everyone to allow the Doctor to escape, but there's no evidence that they wouldn't have let him go anyway, they were hailing him as a war hero minutes earlier. Another problem is created by the framing device where the Doctor retells these events to Clara, this makes the action even less immediate. Overall, there just isn't enough incident here to fill up 60 minutes. It's a failing of Moffat's that often when he has a big emotional episode to do, he overestimates how much that emotion will get the audience through the running time, and his usually detailed and intricate plotting deserts him. Almost nothing happens for huge periods of Hell Bent. There are some superficially impressive moments (the male to female regeneration, the original TARDIS control room) but mostly it's a frustrating let down.

Connectivity: 

Like Asylum of the Daleks, Hell Bent is another Steven Moffat penned single-part story (some people lump it in with Face the Raven and Heaven Sent as a three-parter, but I'm not one of them - each of those three are distinct enough to stand-alone despite the cliffhangers leading in to one another). Both stories feature at least one Dalek and a time fragment of Clara / Oswin Oswald that ends up dead - they are in fact, and coincidentally, the bookends of Jenna Coleman's time on the show, featuring her first and last regular appearance.

Deeper Thoughts:

Gallifrey? No, I've not heard of it. Perhaps it's on an island? We arrived on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands in mid August of 2022. We only had a narrow week-long window in which to book, which was one of the factors dictating the frantic quality of our holiday search - there were UK-based things members of the family had to attend either side. With only a week on the island, would there be any chance for location spotting? It's not that big; one could drive the length of Fuerteventura in under two hours. On the other hand, the family had been very busy before we travelled with school, work, and exams; so, nobody was looking for anything too active from our break. To this end we had - for the first time as a family - booked all inclusive. We'd get full board and as many 'free at the point of use' drinks as we wanted at the hotel. We are lucky that we're comfortably off enough that this is an option for us, but we aren't so comfortably off that we didn't mentally keep our tally - we wanted to get our money's worth (this went double for the children - the 16 year old boy got a minimum of three teeteringly heaped platefuls every meal, including breakfast). This puts a pressure on any outings to be doubly worth it, as you're not only paying to travel somewhere else, but also for anything you consume while you're there. It's much more cost effective to sit by the pool and relax. There was a gym, lots of activities and entertainments, and interesting people to meet in the hotel too, so there wasn't much chance to get bored even if we hadn't brought some books to read and downloaded movies and TV shows to watch. Plus, to be perfectly frank, there's not much to do in Fuerteventura. One of the excursions advertised at the hotel's front desk was to visit Lanzarote, as if they'd risk running out of things to list without suggesting hopping over to the next nearest lump of volcanic rock in the archipelago.

Don't get me wrong, there's shops and bars and waterparks and all those great tourist things, and there are some unique and striking natural areas. It was the latter that presumably attracted the production crew making Hell Bent. Like all the bigger Canary Islands, Fuerteventura has areas that feasibly look like the surface of an alien planet such as Gallifrey - volcanic rock, desert, sand dunes, empty, rolling landscapes of dusty valleys and hills. I don't know whether there's that much that they couldn't have got from a quarry in England and a CGI matte, but they know their business better than I do, and must have thought it was worth it. As quarries are working areas and the Canary Island areas are mostly just barren national parks, it might even work out almost as cheap, as you're not asking anybody to down tools for the shoot. They'd tried other islands in the archipelago - Tenerife, and the previously mentioned Lanzarote - for location shoots for previous stories and wanted to give another island a go presumably. Of the big four tourist destination islands in the Canaries, Doctor Who has now only not filmed in one. I've racked up the lot now, though. I visited Gran Canaria in 1986, a month before Trial of a Timelord's broadcast, holidayed in Lanzarote nearly thirty years after the Doctor did in July 2002 (a couple of weeks before the webcast of  Doctor Who audio story Real Time, fact fans), and stayed on Tenerife in 2018, as recorded here, a couple of months before Jodie Whittaker's era began. This latest trip, a couple of months before Jodie Whittaker's era ends, completes the quartet.

Whatever else I could say and have said about Hell Bent, it certainly looks good; Fuerteventura provides a great landscape for the Gallifrey exterior scenes and also doubles well for Nevada in the brief shots set near the diner. Could I persuade the Better Half and kids to come on a location scout where these images were created, putting aside their soft drinks or cocktails or beers for a few hours? (Side note: I'm easily pleased, but was very excited that they had cervesa on a tap in the hotel's bars and restaurants that one could just operate for oneself; I spent a week perfecting my pouring style.) I supposed that it would depend on how far away those locations were; so, I got online to do the research and quickly ran into a problem. Doctor Who is by no means an unexplored phenomenon; in fact, it's potentially one of the most written-about things (not just TV shows) in existence. An army of amateur and professional analysts have scoured every available scrap of reference material available, and the depths of detail into which they can go would amaze. (A case in point: while I was abroad, I enjoyed a tweet thread including contributions from Matthew Sweet about the situationist graffito glimpsed for a frame or two of the second episode of Patrick Troughton story The Invasion - niche!) Individual making-of articles and dedicated Doctor Who location guides proliferate online, but none of them specify where the Hell Bent filming took place; they all just say Fuerteventura. How can this be? Can there be a fact about Doctor Who, not from its distant past but from less than a decade ago, that is unknown? The best I could find were some behind the scenes photos, a couple of which are shown here. These don't give anything away about the location though, and of course no landmarks are visible in the clips in the story itself.

My photo of the Parque Natural de Corralejo

So, I was at a loss. On stepping off the plane, we had already visited the filming locations of Hell Bent, at least to the level of precision that they were recorded in any available reference. Fuerteventura suddenly seemed a lot bigger: it takes nearly two hours to drive the length of the island, after all - it wasn't going to be possible to search looking at a freeze-frame of the story on my phone until we found a sand dune that matched. The family got to stay by the pool and drink their drinks, and we all relaxed and had a good time. It wasn't likely that we would just stumble on the right location. Or was it? The hotel was in Corralejo, and both town and hotel were on the very edge of the Parque Natural de Corralejo, a large-ish (2.5 by 10.5 kilometres) tract on the coast with a stretch of sands on the North side and an orange-red volcanic landscape to the South. It would provide everything the story would require accessible in one place near to roads and hotels, and not far (transfer took about 35 minutes) from the airport. It's got to be a contender. If you're reading this and you know the full details of the individual locations for Hell Bent's filming then... maybe keep them to yourself, so I can continue to live in blissful ignorance imagining that I got lucky this time!

In Summary:

Disappointing? Hell yes. 

Asylum of the Daleks

Chapter The 238th, which has thousands and thousands of Daleks, each more evil than the last; dizzying, endless Daleks, all here, all the time, forever, watch them, watch the Daleks, they're going to move - watch the Daleks. It's... Daleks!!! 

Plot:

The Daleks use reanimated dead humans to trick and capture the Doctor, Amy and Rory; they then take them (and the TARDIS) aboard a vast Dalek saucer containing the entire parliament of the Daleks; thousands of the tin pepperpots surround them. (The Daleks have never mentioned their parliament before - it offers the possibility of us one day seeing a Dalek House of Lords, a Dalek Black Rod, and perhaps party leadership hustings that involve cold, heartless candidates trotting out aggressive soundbites harshly and incessantly... which we're fairly used to in the UK already, to be honest.) The Daleks want the Doctor and his friends to investigate their asylum planet that contains millions of Daleks with mental health issues. The planet is shielded, but somehow a ship has crashed there, meaning that all the Daleks could escape from the planet. Something as small as a Gallifreyan or two humans if fired at the planet can get through the forcefield, though, so the Daleks shoot the Doctor, Amy and Rory at the planet. They are given bracelets that prevent the nanobots in the atmosphere converting them into Dalek slaves, but Amy loses hers after a struggle with some of the crew of the crashed ship who have been converted into slaves already. The Doctor searches for a crash survivor Oswin that he's been talking to over the airwaves, and who has helped him by hacking the Dalek systems. When he finds her though, she's already been turned into a Dalek long ago, her willpower had just stopped her from realising it yet. Amy and Rory are on the point of getting a divorce, but the Doctor manipulates them to be nice to each other as it will stave off the nanobot conversion (even though he's already put his bracelet on her with sleight of hand, as he is immune anyway) and they stay together. Oswin takes down the forcefield, and the others just manage to teleport back to the Dalek saucer and the TARDIS before the Daleks blow the planet up.

Context:

I watched this story one Sunday afternoon from the disc in the complete seventh series Blu-ray box set, accompanied by the younger two of my kids (boy of 12, girl of 10). The youngest said before I pressed play that she always thinks the trailer at the end of any story is more exciting than what's just watched, and indeed she was very enthusiastic to watch Dinosaurs on a Spaceship when she saw glimpses of it before Asylum's end credits rolled. The 12-year old said very early on that Clara (as both the children called her throughout, I gave up on trying to explain that it was Oswin, actually) was going to turn out to be a Dalek ("because she hasn't got a bracelet"). He'd essentially surmised the correct outcome for the wrong reason, imagining that Clara would, unbeknownst to herself, like the other Dalek slaves depicted, have been converted to a Dalek slave with an eye-stalk in her head. This would make a tiny bit more sense than Oswin's actual fate, I think.

First Time Round:

I often struggle to find memories of my first viewing of Matt Smith stories; it's nothing personal, just that the show wasn't so new and memorably exciting to tune in to as it had been when it first came back, and Smith's stories are long enough ago (unlike Whittaker's and maybe Capaldi's) for me to have forgotten my specific circumstances when they were broadcast. I have a few more memories of this one, but mainly of the build up rather than watching the story itself. I remember that the New Statesman, a UK politics and culture magazine, had an article that week about Dalek creator Terry Nation to tie in with the launch of the show. The magazine didn't normally cover anything as frivolous as Doctor Who, so it was a treat for this one subscriber at least. I also remember the online daily series Pond Life, five short films released one a day over the five days from the 27th to the 31st August 2012, preceding Asylum of the Daleks broadcast on the 1st September. I remember these being very good (writer Chris Chibnall's best work on the series up to that point in fact) right up until just before the end when the last part imploded by shoehorning in Amy and Rory's divorce, a subplot that I found unconvincing (a little more on that below).

Reaction:

The Dalek slaves / robopersons / puppets / whatever you call them (delete as applicable) that appear in this story reveal themselves after their infiltration by letting a Dalek eye-stalk emerge from their foreheads. Why? Can they not see without doing this? Has all their pretence and performance before the stalk extends out, when they're ensnaring the Doctor and friends, been done with their eyes effectively closed? They don't look like they are stumbling around. If they can see just as well without this protuberance then what's the point of showing it? What's the point of them having it fitted in the first place? It looks good, I suppose, if one can get over the slightly phallic nature (it's an erection emerging from their head, there's no other way to say it), but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in the story. I may be a bit short of praise, but I'm not here to bury Asylum of the Daleks altogether; if it were six-feet underground, though, a good epitaph would be "It looks good, but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense". The main plot is that the Daleks have kidnapped the Doctor so he can help destroy their Asylum planet. This is necessary because the forcefield around the planet can only be turned off from inside. This is a silly way to design an asylum, and begs the question of how the Daleks condemned to rot on the planet below got there in the first place without at least one Dalek on guard down there to drop the forcefield now and again. But, we can let them have this - it's such a common flaw that it's almost a genre trope, the escape button that can only be reached by venturing past the dangerous barrier that nobody would ever create by design. Why the Doctor, though? If all the Daleks are too scared, why wouldn't they just send some slaves / robopersons / puppets? That would be a more controllable situation than kidnapping their mortal enemy, who's likely to be hostile and try to turn the situation to his own advantage.

Even if  they decided for whatever reason to proceed with such a silly plan, though - would they really choose to brief the press-ganged enemy agent in their parliament in front of thousands of their kind? Would the Daleks admit that they need the help of their sworn enemy so publicly?  It would make much more sense for it to be a covert mission, briefed on the sly, but then there wouldn't be a reason to show ranks and ranks of massed Daleks. The decision to go for spectacle does not match with the details of the narrative at all. The Daleks are panicking because a ship has managed to breach the forcefield (there's no explanation given as to how this happened, but it did). They know this has happened as they are receiving a signal from the planet playing an aria from Carmen. The Doctor tracks the signal and talks to the person sending it; she's called Oswin and she sounds like Jenna-Louise Coleman. The metatextual intrigue of this is somewhat lost watching a decade later, but I'll touch on it more in a moment; suffice to say, at the time it caused a collective "Ooh, she's not supposed to be in it yet!" from all the fans in the audience. Now, spoiler alert, but the twist is that Oswin has been turned into a Dalek but doesn't realise it yet. This explains how she's been able to access all the systems on the Dalek network, as she's plugged in (but aren't these Daleks supposed to be isolated from the rest, so why does she have access?). Instead of being turned into a slave (wasn't that an automatic process done by nanobots in the atmosphere, why didn't it kick in?), she was fully converted into a Dalek because of her high intelligence. Converted by whom, though? These aren't the Daleks from normal mainstream society, they're inmates - why have they got the equipment we see to convert humans into Daleks, and why have they organised themselves to do so? It's not made clear.

This twist is, if not an outright cheat, very unsatisfactory. It's shaped like the standard intricate constructed fantasy twist narrative of a character - usually someone with mental health issues - creating their own world that's presented at first to the audience as if it's real; this was particularly popular in films in the late 1990s / early 2000s (I'd name examples, but I don't want to spoiler - it was riffed on comedically in the series 3 Community episode Curriculum Unavailable, if you've seen that). Crucially, though, such films or shows needed to take a lot of care in how they showed the person in their fantasy world interacting with people outside their fantasy. When the Doctor finds Dalek-Oswin towards the end for the reveal, she talks in her head like a girl from Blackpool, but the voice sounds to the Doctor like a Dalek. It would be a gut punch of a moment if and only if she hadn't been broadcasting to him throughout the episode before that in her own voice - how has she been changing her voice in that context? How has she been able to broadcast the score of Carmen when it's just in her head? Someone could theorise that she's used her awesome hacking skills somehow to source a recording and play it, and to scrape together some voice-changing technology. She'd have to have a certain level of awareness of her predicament to have done this, though, and the whole point is that she does not. Okay, someone could continue to theorise that maybe her level of awareness waxes and wanes as she battles against the Dalek conditioning, and she constructs some real world reinforcement in her more lucid moments to bolster her fantasy of denial. This level of imaginative heavy lifting going on in the background in people's heads, though, takes away from what should be the straightforward pleasure of a twist reveal. The gut punch is instead a swing and a miss.

The surprise of a new regular companion introduced early but then killed off starts an arc-plot mystery that continues in the Christmas special in 2012 and the run of episodes in 2013. Even in this, though, the events of Asylum of the Daleks don't stack up. Oswin is a version of the Doctor's future companion Clara who got fragmented in time. Clara lives many separate lives undoing the timeline interference done by a baddie. None of that explains why Oswin has heightened intelligence, particularly concerning hacking (and Asylum specifies that she has this before she's turned into a Dalek). In later story The Bells of Saint John, Clara's brain was augmented with computing skills, but there was no evidence they still remained in her head by the time she was fragmented, and anyway that was a 21st century upload and wouldn't help someone to hack future systems that even the Doctor thinks can't be hacked. Again, one can tidy it up mentally if one is so inclined, but it's messy and doesn't have the satisfying locking-together moment of a plot that has been worked out well (as many of writer and showrunner Steven Moffat's other scripts do have, to be fair). The emotional subplot of the Ponds failing marriage is also unsatisfactory. If you love someone and you're worried that not being able to have kids is an issue, wouldn't you talk to them and look into adoption before you leave them without explanation so they can procreate with someone else? It's a superficial and fake confected conflict.

The only bit of Asylum of the Daleks that looks cool and also makes sense - and the whole is almost worth it just for this bit - is the hallucinatory scene where Amy walks into danger, as she perceives a group of Daleks as humans. Apart from that, jokes don't land (Rory asking what colour the Daleks will be as all the good questions have been taken), and the dramatic bits seem a bit forced (like the Doctor facing off against the Daleks). It's a rare occasion for Moffat where he's having an off day with the kind of material - twists, quips, emotional bits refracted through a sci-fi prism - that is usually his stock in trade. Maybe Daleks just bring him bad luck; his tenure doesn't feature any good use of Skaro's finest except in cameos; he seems much more content writing for Cybermen or Zygons.

Connectivity: 

There's not much of a connection between Inferno and Asylum of the Daleks; I'm reaching a bit, but both involve a plan to penetrate the depths of a planet and both feature characters coming under a malign influence emanating from that planet. That's about it. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Doc's Holidays. Because of the Covid pandemic, Doctor Who's last series and subsequent specials (two of which have been broadcast at the time of writing, with one left to come out in a couple of months) were shot 100% in the UK. This bucked a trend in recent years of increased overseas filming. Since landing in China for the fourth broadcast story in Who's first season, Marco Polo, the Doctor has been a globe-trotter, but the show, not so much: it wasn't possible until many years after that first season for a sequence set in, say, Paris to actually be filmed in Paris. That finally happened in 1979, when City of Death became the first ever Doctor Who story to have any scenes filmed at a location or studio outside Queen Elizabeth the Second's immediate realm. My life as a traveller has mirrored Doctor Who to a certain extent. I went abroad on holiday a few times in the 80s, but by the time Doctor Who came back in 2005, I didn't tend to leave Blighty for a vacation; more recently, I started again to travel abroad with the family a bit, but - just as it did for the good Doctor - Covid put paid to that for a while. The main driver for that pattern in our family was the relative youth of my children, and general ecological concerns about flying too much. We stayed in the UK for holidays when they were younger, and only recently ventured further afield to show them a little something of the world. Covid is still around and still making travel logistics more complicated than they used to be, but we have decided to risk another foreign jaunt this year. There's no word as yet on whether Doctor Who is going to be similarly bold; all the filming for 2023's episodes that's been spotted so far has been done on home shores.

Readers with long memories (Hi Mum!) will know that some consideration is always given to the suitability of a Doctor Who story to watch at any Perry family holiday location. This started when we holidayed in 2016 at the filming location for The Androids of Tara. I have to make it clear that the holiday came first and the story second, in that and every subsequent instance. I promise I am not dragging my poor fam around the world to spot Doctor Who locations. I admit, though, that there sometimes is influence in the wrong direction: in the search online for this year's destination I came across a nice hotel in Seville, but quietly vetoed it as I wasn't in the mood to watch The Two Doctors again so soon after watching it as part of the recently released Season 22 Blu-ray box set. I'd always thought anyway that the pool of possibly apt stories was too small to fit that many holidays, except by luck or by straining the connection. I may have had my mind stuck in the twentieth century in that thinking, though. In classic series Who, there were indeed only a handful of overseas filming examples from which one could take inspiration: apart from Paris and Seville, the series had visited Amsterdam (for Arc of Infinity), Lanzarote (for Planet of Fire), and - if it counts - Vancouver for the TV Movie. It started to happen so often more recently though that I'd lost track. Even I, as a pretty nerdy fan who's into the details, might have forgotten that Asylum of the Daleks has scenes shot in Spain. When the family took their first ever foreign holiday, to Tenerife, I settled for the random story that came up Vincent and the Doctor as it happened to feature some overseas filming (in Croatia). I'd missed completely that there were two stories actually filmed in Tenerife, one I'd blogged but one I hadn't at that time (The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar and The Pyramid at the End of the World). I humbly apologise to the worldwide fandom for being so remiss as to overlook this.

In my defence, overseas filming had become nothing like as rare or special as previously by the time of Peter Capaldi's tenure, and it was to get even more prevalent after that. It started slowly, though. The five instances before 2005 were barely added to in the early years of twenty-first century Who. The Dalek in Manhattan double-parter shot some backgrounds in New York, recently blogged story The Fires of Pompeii filmed in an Italian studio backlot, and Planet of the Dead shot exteriors in Dubai. Until the stories for 2010 and onwards, it was easy to keep track of those few instances. It exploded a bit after that: as well as the Van Gogh story, Matt Smith's first series also featured Croatian filming for The Vampires of Venice, there was filming in Utah and Arizona for the following year's two-part season opener, the year after that Spanish filming provided footage for A Town called Mercy as well as Asylum, and full cast New York filming took place for The Angels Take Manhattan. The production team for Capaldi's era loved the Canary Islands; as well as shooting the aforementioned stories in Tenerife, they went to Lanzarote (Kill the Moon) and Fuerteventura (The Zygons 2-parter amongst others). It also visited Bulgaria (The Return of Doctor Mysterio) and Valencia (Smile). When Jodie Whittaker took over, Cape Town became the destination of choice (The Ghost Monument, Rosa, Spyfall, Praxeus, Can You Hear Me?, The Timeless Children) but there were also excursions to Spain (Demons of the Punjab), and Tenerife and Bulgaria again (Orphan 55 and the Nikolai Tesla story, respectively). In Whittaker's second year, for the first time ever, more episodes had featured overseas-shot sequences than hadn't. As such, there is quite a bit of scope to allow me to find an un-blogged story with some connection to the holiday that was eventually booked for this year, and I have indeed found one. I'm all packed, and have downloaded the relevant story to watch while I'm away. When I get back and publish the blog post for that story, I'll tell you all about my family trip to... Gallifrey. 

In Summary:

It looks good, but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. 

Inferno

Chapter The 237th, the chapter that turned around and found that they were all wearing eyepatches. 

Plot:

The Doctor and Liz are working at a government funded scientific project centre run by the single-minded, driven and downright rude Professor Stahlman. Stahlman doesn't want the Doctor or Liz as advisers, so they are mainly doing their own research - experimenting to get the TARDIS console working again using the centre's nuclear power supply. Stahlman plans to penetrate the Earth's crust to release a powerful gas that can be used for the UK's energy needs, the ultimate in fracking. It gets even more fracking intriguing though when there are some unexplained deaths, and the Brig and UNIT are brought in to investigate. A green goo leaks out of the drill-head, and if it touches a human's skin they begin to transform into a wolfman-like creature called a Primord. Stahlman gets a tiny bit on his hand and gets even more single-minded and rude, pushing everything beyond safety limits to get to the crust penetration point as soon as possible. An energy surge sends the Doctor, the console and his car into a parallel dimension where the drilling is further along. The UK is a fascist republic, and there are aggressive alternative versions of the Doctor's friends (Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, Section Leader Liz Shaw, and Platoon Under Leader Benton) and the other people working on the project. The drill penetrates the Earth's crust, explosions and earthquakes ensue, and most of the staff flee; alt-Stahlman, alt-Benton and a number of soldiers turn into Primords but the Doctor and the others escape. The Doctor tells them it is too late to save their world, but they can help him return to his universe and save Earth there. They work together to do this, but when the time comes for the Doctor to return, the Brigade Leader tries to force the Doctor to take them with him. Alt-Liz shoots alt-Brig, and the Doctor returns. The real world Stahlman goes full wolfman, and everyone else helps to stop the countdown just in time. 

Context:

It's old and it's seven episodes long, so I did not even consider trying to interest any of the family in watching it with me. The plan was to watch the special edition DVD version one episode a day over the course of a week. I managed this for a couple of days for episodes one and two, but then on the third day I just watched all the remaining five episodes one after the other, such is the high quality of Inferno. Family members occasionally came in the room, but nobody stuck around nor commented.

First Time Round:

This story was one of the very first I ever watched on a fan-exchanged nth generation video. Not quite a pirated video, as Inferno wasn't commercially available at the time (late 1991), but a recording from Australian television from when the story had been repeated there. Burnt onto the tape forever was the continuity announcer coming in over the credits at the end of episode one talking about how the "green man" would be back next time, and talking about the many items of Doctor Who merchandise available at the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) shop in Sydney "But probably not a green man". My memory stubbornly tells me that the serial was in black and white, but it can't have been as those comments wouldn't make any sense (although Slocombe, the poor fellow revealed at the first cliffhanger who's changing into a Primord, looks more blue than green). I'm probably getting it confused with The Daemons that I saw at the same time, that version of which was definitely monochrome. The two stories had been given to me on tape by David, fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog. We'd met a couple of months earlier in my first week at Durham University, when I barged into his room rudely on hearing Doctor Who playing therein (see the First Time Round section of the The Daemons blog post for more details). He'd very nicely loaned me a few tapes to take home with me to watch over the Christmas break.

I must have been particularly taken with Inferno, as I did a viewing with a larger group of student mates on a Sunday when back in Durham the next January, in Mike's room (he was the only one of my immediate peer group with a single room and a VCR). My memory is though that some of the assembled, a group who were less die-hard fans than me or David, weren't that enamoured of the story, and found some aspects of it laughable. Not the scene one might think either (where many characters turn into wolfmen with very obvious joke shop fake teeth), but what I considered to be good dramatic bits. As the story is quite long, we had to break off in the middle for lunch in the college canteen, and I remember an argument taking place over that meal where I tried to explain the limitations within which Doctor Who of this era was made (every fan probably has been through something like this, I'm sure). One other strong memory I have of watching this story was from many years later when it first came out on DVD. My eldest child had just been born, but was kept in the hospital with his Mum as he was a little sickly. I was on my own in the house, unable to stay with them. Catching up on the extras before I went to bed, I listened to Sergeant Benton actor John Levene's solo commentary on one of the episodes, and it seemed to me that all he was doing was chorusing the names of the various cast and crew that were no longer with us. In that moment, late of an evening, feeling lonely and missing the Better Half and my tiny newborn child, I suddenly felt very down, almost tearful. Despite it causing at least one argument and another moment of existential angst, the story remained and remains a firm favourite of mine.

Reaction:

There's no point dancing around the point, this is going to be a bit of a rave; Inferno is one of my top ten (probably top five) Doctor Who stories. Of course, if anyone actually asked me to compile that chart I'd go through a procession of agonies, and stories would be in or out, there'd be many a longlist and shortlist scribbled and scratched out, and many pencil tops chewed. Suffice to say, it felt like one of my top five at the time of watching, and - as any Doctor Who fan re-watching episodes they have happy memories of from long ago could tell you - that's by no means ever guaranteed. The first great thing that the story has going for it is the premise. Having inherited from the previous production team the arc narrative of the Doctor as exiled and trapped on Earth, Terrance Dicks - script editor during the Pertwee years - thereafter often moaned in interviews that it restricted the types of stories that could be told by his writers, one joking comment was that all that was left was alien invasion and mad scientist stories. The middle two of the four stories broadcast in Pertwee's first year pulled away from this, endeavouring to do something different (the creatures aren't invading as they've always lived here, the aliens that look like they're invading are goodies being manipulated by humans). The first and last stories lean more in to it, and give perhaps the best alien invasion in opening story Spearhead from Space, and the final word on mad scientists in the last story, Inferno. In some ways, this season finale is another version of a favourite template from Patrick Troughton's time, where a scientific base led by an unstable, driven man (it's always a man) is threatened by destructive forces. With the focus on the mechanics of drilling and bodily transformation of humans coming under the influence of a malign force, Inferno bears many similarities to Fury from the Deep from two years earlier. It's so much better than that earlier story, though (and Fury from the Deep isn't exactly a clunker).

In some of those scientific bases in Troughton's time, it stretched credibility that a person so brittle and over-emotional (such as Robson in Fury from the Deep) had been put in charge; Stahlman is much more believable; rude and single-minded, yes, but within plausible limits; plus, the backstory for the latitude he's allowed (he's promised credulous government officials that he'll provide them with the next North Sea Gas bonanza) is all too credible. In Fury from the Deep there's no coherent shape to what the forces of antagonism are doing or why; Inferno has an undeniable shape, the shape of a rapier. There is a very precise and singular drive towards the penetration of the crust (which gives the escalating tension of a ticking clock throughout the narrative). It is as simple as a fable: deep forces from within the Earth want to punish humanity for its hubris, destroying it, and cleansing the planet with fire. Anyone who comes under the influence of these forces gradually regresses into a primal beast, helping to hasten that destruction. Inexpensive effects therefore work effectively - like the moments where Stahlman, gradually being taken over, hears all other sounds drop away except a high-pitched noise in his head - centred as they are within the clarity of the premise, and a cast and crew treating that premise seriously. Whatever force is impacting events in Inferno, it can't be reasoned with, and there's no compromise. The one clear purpose of the Doctor as protagonist is to stop the drilling. Such a simple plot would not have filled seven 25 minute episodes (this duration being another constraint inherited by this production team from the previous one), which forced Dicks and writer Don Houghton to think laterally and bring in the parallel universe subplot to fill out the middle episodes.

The parallel universe aspect of the story is the little touch of genius that pushes Inferno from being very good to being excellent. It's the most interesting method of padding out a story anyone could think of, as the same events can be played out twice and yet not be a cheat. The moment in the final episode where the Doctor knows that the number two output pipe has blown, as he's seen it happen before and what the consequences will be, is exciting because we as the audience want things to turn out differently this time around. There's a bit of fun to be had too with the 1984-style trappings - pictures of the great leader with the slogan UNITY IS STRENGTH - and there's possibly the greatest interrogation scene in the whole of Doctor Who, as the nasty versions of the regular cast give the Doctor a grim going over. Overall, the parallel universe subplot is so successful that it's a wonder that Doctor Who didn't do such a thing more often (see Deeper Thoughts for more details). The biggest boon it gives the story is the opportunity for most of the actors to give their all in two linked but contrasting roles each; they all - regular and guest cast alike - rise to this challenge. Best of all of these is an astonishing performance and one of the best given by anyone in Doctor Who, classic or new series, Nicholas Courtney's turn as the Brigade Leader. He expertly calibrates the gradual rising panic of a bully out of his depth, as everything that gave him power and protection is stripped away. It's a joy to watch. As the stalwart hero, Pertwee gets much less interesting material by comparison, but he's nonetheless excellent too.

Everyone's giving their all behind the camera too. Director Douglas Camfield's film work is possibly his best ever here. The location (the Kingsnorth Industrial estate standing in for the Inferno project research centre) is a gift, with impressive high structures and gantries, to all of which the crew were given access quicker than you can say "Health and Safety wasn't invented yet"! Camfield exploits this for all it's worth, and creates some great action sequences with the stuntmen of the Havoc team, including the fantastic fall done by Roy Scammell from the top of a cooling tower. Another good filmed sequence is the set of trippy shots of manipulated reflected images of the Doctor as he travels between dimensions. Studio work is great too, though it came at a cost to Camfield who had a minor heart attack halfway through (producer Barry Letts took over and followed Camfield's notes, achieving a seamless join). There's a palpable atmosphere of heat, sweat and terror achieved. The script has some great dialogue ("But I don't exist in your world!" "Then you won't feel the bullets when we shoot you", "That's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!" and many more examples). There's the first signs here of the evolution of the Pertwee stories from the harder, grounded professional approach to the more family-like atmosphere of the later years, with Sergeant Benton joshing with the Doctor and the Brigadier, and the Scooby-Doo everybody laugh comedy ending where the Doctor gets the TARDIS working but only sufficiently to deposit him onto the nearest rubbish tip. There's something for everyone, with even a little love story subplot between the characters of Petra and Greg. With only that tiny dodgy make-up effect mentioned in the First Time Round section above as a black mark (and it's the tiniest of moments), this truly seems like one of the best stories in Doctor Who's long history.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature characters being influenced by forces from deep beneath the Earth's surface, and climax with a volcanic eruption that kills off most of the guest cast. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The strange Doctor and the madness of multiverses. Doctor Who doesn't do parallel universe stories very often. This would be more surprising if it were a time travel show, but it isn't for the most part. It mainly just uses time travel to efficiently create a succession of different settings and genres, acting more like an anthology of tales linked only by the regular cast using the magic door of the TARDIS to step into a new adventure every few weeks. It took a full year after the series began in 1963 for the focus to cease to be just on exploration / escape and to move more towards 'good versus evil' tales. It was obviously going to take even longer before the scripts properly explored the internal mechanisms of time travel, and even longer before they covered something relatively obscure like using multiverse theory in a science fiction scenario. Relatively obscure as it was back then in Doctor Who's classic years, I mean; at the time of writing this in August 2022, multiverse theory is popular and is used for the plots of blockbuster movies. A lot of this does seem to just be about casting, though. If Marvel Studios want to have some fun and serve their fans by featuring actors that may have played a famous superhero or supervillain role some time in the past, or for a different movie company, then parallel dimensions are a rich seam to mine for those alt-versions. That Doctor Who never had to resort to such methods is testament to one of its better original concepts, regeneration. The main role is recast without interrupting the flow of the overarching narrative, so if - just as a hypothetical example, you understand - it was desired to unite three actors who'd played the lead role at different times in the programme's history, it could be done easily using the standard basic time travel conventions of the show without any extra effort to create whole new universes. If - if - Marvel ever wanted to do the same without jumping through such narrative hoops, there'd just be no way, homie.

Without that meta-textual reason for a parallel universe story, there are probably three main textual reasons. First, to allow for dark reflections, for the audience interest - as well as actor challenge - of presenting evil versions of heroic characters; for example, the original series Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror presented a few of the regulars' villainous alternatives, including a memorably bearded Spock. Generally, if Doctor Who wanted to do this, it just made it a coincidence and moved on. Naughty characters the Abbot of Amboise and Salamander just happen to look like William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton respectively, they don't come from another reality. Inferno is the only exception to this rule in the classic series; as noted above, the regular and guest cast (with the exception of star Jon Pertwee who crosses from one dimension to the other and has no counterpart there) are great presenting fascist versions of themselves. Arguably, it isn't the main multiverse rationale of Inferno. The story uses the parallel universe excursion primarily for the second textual reason - to do what other stories flirt with but can never take all the way: to let the countdown reach zero and actually destroy the world. This then ups the stakes for the Doctor's home universe, when he returns there in the final episode with time to spare to avert the catastrophe. In this way, it acts as a glimpse into a potential future, which Doctor Who does much more often (for example when the TARDIS 'jumps a time track' and shows the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki a horrifying potential future in The Space Museum, or the Doctor showing the ravaged Earth if Sutekh isn't stopped in Pyramids of Mars). Technically these potential timelines come under the multiverse heading, but - in those examples - it isn't dwelt upon in the story, and may not have been thought of in that way by the authors.

The Toymaker's domain (in the Celestial Toymaker), the land of fiction (in The Mind Robber) and the dimension where the futuristic Arthurian knights come from (in Battlefield) are all different single options of universe within the multiverse choice, but they may as well just be any old weird planet that the TARDIS lands on as it does every other week. The UNIT stories of the period of Inferno technically all take place in an alternate reality anyway, where there's an advanced UK space programme and a BBC3. The third and final key textual reason for the use of the multiverse approach makes the differences more significant; this is the counter-factual, either personal or more usually political. Even here, Doctor Who seldom finds the need to play. One common example outside Who is the 'what if the Nazis had won' narrative. It's lightly sketched in, but this essentially seems to be the background of the parallel Earth in Inferno, where it's hinted that some Mosleyite faction has gained control of the UK, aligned with the Axis powers during WW2 (likely after these powers invaded), and made the country a republic, executing the royal family. I'm doing some imaginative heavy lifting there, but it's a more than plausible tying up of the hints on screen. The other major political counter-factual parallel universe Doctor Who story (The Rise of the Cyberman / The Age of Steel) is even more half-hearted, with only slight hints that there's been a shift to the totalitarian some time in the past. The more personal take on the counter-factual (how would a life be different if different choices were made) has been done in the new series years a couple of times in Father's Day and Turn Left, the latter acting much like a Doctor Who It's a Wonderful Life, showing the terrible state the world would be in if the Doctor hadn't been around. Maybe it's a good thing that the series doesn't do this kind of story very often as what unites all the times it did is that the alternative world presented either descends into fascism, or gets destroyed, or both. It would be nice if a potential present or future could be one that's better than what we have now (in life as well as in Doctor Who).  

In Summary:

Inferno is so hot right now.