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.