Category: Doctor Who

Well now. That’s more like it.

You know what the difference is between a good mystery and a bad mystery? I mean a mystery story here, not just mysteries abstractly. A good mystery is honest. When you reach the end, you should be able to look back and see how you got there: you should be able to take all the pieces you were given and put them together yourself. A bad mystery is dishonest. When you get to the end, you don’t have all the pieces, and some of the ones you have are wrong. A good mystery is a lot like a game of Mornington Crescent. The self-evidently exact right moment for the big reveal at the climax of a mystery is one second before the audience figures it out. You don’t have to worry about that in a bad mystery, because it’s literally impossible to figure it out ahead. Oh, I mean, you could just shoot in the dark and get it. Or you could get it by knowing that it’s going to be the guy who it always is in this kind of story. But you can’t actually derive the answer from what was presented. A bad mystery lies. It turns to the camera and tells you a big old whopper to your face: when the killer is alone he says something aloud that’s part of his false alibi not to mislead anyone in the story, but to mislead you. The detective turns his back to the camera when he inspects the key piece of evidence. Scooby-Doo is not a good mystery (But no big. It’s very good in other ways). You don’t really want to figure it out too early, but once you know the answer, you should feel like you could have figured it out.

I don’t feel like Stephen Moffat has been writing good mysteries. I feel like every plot twist for years has either been far too obvious or entirely out of nowhere. He’s been dishonest, spending whole seasons seemingly shouting “THIS IS IMPORTANT WANT THIS OBSESS OVER THIS” only to have the “twist” be “HA HA I FOOLED YOU, IT WASN’T IMPORTANT AFTER ALL! YOU ARE DUMB FOR CARING!”

And then there’s Hell Bent.

So let’s get the small things out of the way:

• Clara affecting an ex-pat accent in the diner scenes.
• Is it just me, or did The Woman (the unnamed caretaker of the barn) have kinda a Mrs. Garrett vibe?
• The shadow of the gunship retreating as the Doctor walks toward it.
• The ninth Doctor’s theme reinterpreted as if by Ennio Morricone.
• When the guard join the Doctor, they do not raise their weapons in his defense. They throw them down instead.
  • Which is particularly important given what comes next.
• So Timothy Dalton is entirely the wrong sort of actor to play Rassilon as he appears in this episode, but still, going from Timothy Dalton to Donald Sumpter has got to be one of history’s great downgrades.
• The Time Lords keep zombies in their basement. Good people do not keep zombies in their basement.
• There’s a big unanswered, and honestly unasked question of “Why is this coming up now?” Why did the Time Lords suddenly decide that this whole “Hybrid” thing was suddenly a big and imminent enough deal that they’d torture the Doctor for half the age of the universe over it? All we ever get is “Rassilon grew afraid.”
• I think it is a real problem the extent to which this episode minimizes Missy: she’s not actually in it, when this is the episode that finally reveals what was behind her giving Clara the Doctor’s number.
  • Not that there is any room for her in the plot.
• Can we please not have any CGI space-diners any more? At least not until they fire their CGI artists and hire someone competent. Because that is a wonderful idea that I do not want to see defiled by the shit CG this show keeps doing.
• Speaking of things can we please not have, “Next season is about how the universe is collapsing due to the Doctor’s fucking around with the web of time.” Let’s not have that. Please. If you’re going to recycle stuff from Big Finish, make it something clever like “…ish”.

But that’s all beside the point. And you know what else is beside the point? That the whole thing is a parallel for the Doctor-Donna arc back in season 4: that the gestalt of the Doctor and his companion becomes an entity in its own right of terrifying power, able to save or doom the universe, ultimately ending in a rejection of the tenth Doctor’s solution of erasing Donna’s memory.

It’s also beside the point that the framing scenes are clearly set up to imply to us that the Doctor is telling this story to a mind-wiped Clara (Or, sure, a Clara-Fragment a la “Name of the Doctor”, except that there has been no indication that any of those are left and the whole balance of everything since that point has been “And now that is over and done with”), and the last-second twist that she actually knows and is playing dumb, while he doesn’t actually recognize her.

And it is even beside the point that Clara’s story ends with her, now quasi-immortal herself, running off in a stolen (Classic-style, no less) TARDIS with Me, heading to Gallifrey “the long way ’round.” Of course that is how the story of the “Doctoring” of Clara ends. How else could it?

No. Because, for all everyone has said about the “Doctoring” of Clara, of Clara becoming a mirror for the Doctor, of her eventually dying because she wanted to “be like him”, the thing that, as far as I know, no one has commented on all season long is this:

Season 9 isn’t the story of the Doctoring of Clara. It’s the story of the unDoctoring of the Doctor. It’s so damned clear now. Right from the start, all of a sudden, the Doctor’s dropped his sonic screwdriver, he’s started wearing sunglasses, playing guitar, he’s dropped the “magician” outfit for T-shirts. He hugs. And remember everything I said last week? The Doctor, the man who solves problems by being clever, is incredibly dense, takes all episode to work out the incredibly obvious, and the man who can’t stand to sit still solves his problem by spending four billion years punching it.

All of this culminating, as, of course, it must, with this man, the man who never would, picking up a gun and shooting the general in the chest.

So in the end, there’s your real reversal of the Doctor-Donna plot: the Doctor loses his memories of Clara and stops being The Hybrid, and puts on the velvety coat and puts away the sunglasses and gets a new screwdriver and goes back to being The Doctor.

I didn’t even really like the second half of this episode. And yet, I haven’t felt this good about an episode of Doctor Who in two years, six months and eighteen days.

 

Many, many, many years ago, I had — I’ll admit this story is going to sound unlikely — a friend. Her name was Shelley, and she was the only person I knew who liked Doctor Who as much as I did.

The reason I bring it up is that one of the things Shelley and I would do was to collaboratively author fanfic. Or at least, author fanfic premises. And there was one in particular that I’ve always thought about talking about because there were some weird coincidences to do with it. But since all I have in the way of evidence that this is an actual thing is a pile of nearly illegible handwritten notes in a 4-inch pocket notebook that is probably somewhere in my parents’ attic, I always reckoned people would just think I was making shit up, with the bit I added after the TV Movie about there being a time war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, with the protagonist being the only survivor.

But I wish I’d mentioned it sooner now, because of the basic premise — which I don’t even get to take credit for myself, since Shelley usually came up with the big idea and I did more of the detail work. But the premise of this Doctor Who spin-off was this: that the reason the Doctor and Susan had settled down in a scrapyard in 1960s London before a couple of interloping schoolteachers blew their cover was because they’d been trying to set up a stable respectable home-life for the Doctor’s niece, Jessica, who he’d sent into hiding because the Time Lords were trying to kill her. Because, and this is where it gets relevant, there was this old Time Lord prophecy (and, of course, being Time Lords, “prophecy” is probably something weird and science-fictiony involving metatemporal perception), see, about how Gallifrey’s destruction would be caused by a Time Lord-Human hybrid, and the Doctor’s brother had gone and married an Earth girl.

This would have been, I must explain, around 1990. We’re talking before the TV Movie, before even the Leekley version, before anyone except maybe Nicholas Briggs had taken a stab at wiping out the Time Lords, and we certainly hadn’t heard of the Audio-Visuals at this point. Now, in the original idea that me and Shelley had, I think the Time Lords were just wrong about this and being assholes. But later, in the time between the TV movie and the destruction of Gallifrey in the BBC book line, I got this idea that there would be a twist where it turned out that she actually did start the Time War, by inadvertently violating the carefully negotiated terms of a precarious cease-fire (She personally would survive by, I having read the original version of Human Nature by then, getting turned into a fully-human child to be raised by her former companions. There was a comic relief bit where the Doctor marries them by the power vested in him by the Fourth Galactic Alliance, the great Prophet Zarquon, the Sisterhood of Karn, and the state of New Jersey).

So I bring all this up now for the obvious reasons. And, I mean, also to point out that,  “A half-human Time Lord,” and, “The Time Lords have a prophecy that they’re gonna be wiped out by a hybrid,” are both ideas that literally a couple of twelve-year-olds (I was eleven, but Shelley was older.) could come up with.

But anyway…

• This episode is very straightforwardly a “Video Game Episode Written by Someone Who’s Never Actually Played One”. This is not exactly a complaint: I’m not really aware of any Video Game Episode that was clearly written by someone with a better than superficial understanding of how video games work. And it’s certainly better than most in terms of depicting a very methodically rules-based environment. I note for instance that it is different from practically every other Doctor Who episode in that the ultimate solution is for the Doctor to very slowly, very methodically work out the rules of the situation and play by them. Not exploit them, not cheat them, not change them. The Doctor simply grinds for two billion years until he reaches level 999.
  • The most obvious point of comparison, what with a giant clockwork tower and constant, slow pursuit by an enemy you can’t fight, who will basically just kill you if he catches you is the Clock Tower series, which is about someone being chased around a, uh, clock tower by a slow-moving enemy who will kill her if he catches her and who she can’t fight.
  • The other straightforward comparison is Undertale, a game styled after 8-bit JRPGs, but which engages its own mechanics on a diagetic level. It is not a spoiler to say that it becomes clear very early that some of the characters are aware of the player’s ability to save and restore the game: the save mechanism itself is presented as (using the game’s own terminology) the power of the soul to change fate itself through determination. What is a spoiler is to say that [spoiler mode=’inline’]the ability to save-scum is the power that the ultimate antagonist is seeking for himself[/spoiler].
    • (The picture of Clara fills you with DETERMINATION)
• Other obvious point of comparison for someone being trapped in a surrealistic hell-world designed to extract his Great Big Secret: The Prisoner.
• It is curious that in fifty years, this is, I think, the first time they’ve done a “Circle around a time loop until you figure out enough to beat it,” in a time travel show. And technically, they still haven’t, as the version they did in the show about time travel is one which lacks not only time travel, but also lacks the protagonist iteratively learning how to escape the loop: the Doctor learns everything he needs to know in a single pass and at no point in two billion years of tries does he every do something different, like maybe write “Bring the shovel with you, it’ll hurt your knuckles less.”
  • There is, I think we can assume, some number of iterations thousands of years before the episode opens before he “stabilizes” into the pattern we actually see: the iteration where he carves “I AM IN 12”. But that part isn’t what the story is about. Which is really weird, because not only is the figuring-it-out part the focus of every other Groundhog Day story, it’s also the focus of the overwhelming majority of Doctor Who stories.
• And indeed, as I said before, this is not a story about the Doctor being clever. He doesn’t exploit. He doesn’t cheat. He’s actually not very clever at all. It takes him 40 minutes to work out what the audience (I assume, unless you’re all very dim) worked out absolutely no later than when he hangs his wet clothes up to dry, probably sooner, about this being an iterative save/restore plot. It takes him until his second close-call with I am Just Going to Call Him The Ghost of Christmas Future because it is no less apropos than “The Veil” to realize that it’s confessions that stop it. No, he doesn’t clever his way out. The clever man who solves problems with intellect and romance instead of brute force and cynicism punches the fucking wall until the fucking wall falls down.
• Which is kinda in keeping with the season arc, what with the BIG GIANT MYSTERY of the hybrid, a thing which has never been mentioned or alluded to even once until it started getting mentioned out of nowhere this season, being so transparently obvious that you’ve already figured it out even if you stopped watching two years ago and all you know is the next sentence: There’s an ancient Time Lord legend about a being called “The Hybrid” who is the scion of two warrior races and who will lay waste to Gallifrey. See? You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?
• Note that the Doctor having known who the Hybrid was all along is completely inconsistent with the Doctor’s DEEP MEANINGFUL REACTION to Ashildir. Yes, yes, “The Doctor lies. Even when no one is listening or looking and he’s clearly only doing it for the benefit of the audience as a cheat by the writers to keep the audience from figuring it out.”
  • Yes, of course Ashildir has taken to calling herself “Me”.
• After spending two billion years punching a wall because the secret of the Hybrid must NEVER EVER EVER be told, literally the second thing he does after escaping is say who the Hybrid is.
  • But that’s not out of character, given that “The secret the Doctor will take to his grave,” turned out to be “I don’t count my ninth life because I fought in the Time War and blew up my home planet. You know, the thing I pretty much tell everyone I meet.”
• I mean yeah, sure, maybe it’ll turn out that the whole “Hybrid” thing is way more clever a twist than it seems. But when has Moffat ever done that? If anything he seems to strongly believe that it is wrong of you to want a clever twist, no matter how strongly every single thing in the story has been crafted deliberately to make you want one. River Song is exactly who she seemed to be from the moment we met her: The Doctor’s Future Wife. The War Doctor is exactly who we all assumed him to be, the secret incarnation between McGann and Eccleston. The Impossible Girl is just an ordinary person and the Doctor was wrong to treat her like a puzzle.
• But okay, though. If it turns out that the Doctor is half-human, and that the actual point of this season is to redeem that element of the TV Movie by declaring that, y’know what, let’s just fucking own every ridiculous thing in this show’s past. All of it. We will not shy away from this shit no matter how stupid it is, then I think I’ll be okay with that. That will actually be kind of cool.
  • But if so, I want the Zarbi in the Christmas Special.
• I did this coming Saturday’s Tales From /lost+found last Friday, before I’d seen “Heaven Sent”, and now I wish I’d posted it then. But this week will do just as well.