I wound up going into rather more detail about the episode than I'd intended elsewhere, so...

Spoiler

I got used to defending Clara to her detractors a long time ago. Through the slightly bland version we had in series 7, where the efforts to sustain the mystery about the multiple versions of her meant that they couldn't really give her a personality, to the controversial series 8 with her kickstarting the entire concept of the Doctor, and 'stealing' his screentime, to her return after a beautifully sad and tragic exit at the end of that series.

So to be sat here tonight, stunned at how you can go from the masterful 'Face the Raven' and 'Heaven Sent' to the rubbish we've just watched is incredibly disappointing. That was the payoff to all of the build up? A scary Hybrid, the return to Galifrey, the pain of Clara's death...and we're just going to run around giving Clara her fourth exit scene?

Objectively, I can look at the episode and acknowledge that it had a lot of good things. Prior to Clara's return, I was on the edge of my seat, great stuff all round. The Cloisters were a great set, really spooky, and the scene with Me was the best Maisie Williams has done on the show, IMO. And as much as I hated the fact that it happened at all, Capaldi and Coleman were acting their socks off the entire time.

There comes a point though where you have to accept that a character's story is done. Clara had a great send off a year ago, but they managed to make it work with her back this series. Tonight's was a step too far.

 

While not even nearly as good as the previous episode, it wasn't a bad final episode. It felt like they wasted Rassilon though.

Clara's fate worked well enough, but I disliked what happened to the Doctor.

Spoiler

Generally I dislike when they're erasing memories of the main characters because it feels like they're undoing what happened to them and it's just barely better than 'it was all dream' explanation when they want to remove some events. At least it was just information about Clara and not all their adventures.

Of course, the whole thing was pointless really since the Doctor could get her photo from the UNIT for example.

 

My god, this was fucking rubbish.

Absolutely amazing to me that Moffat could take the awesome setup from Heaven Sent, which had me more hyped for Doctor Who than I've been since A Good Man Goes To War, and shit out this sad excuse for an episode.

I'm particularly disgusted that in the 'return to Galiifrey' episode they spent barely any fucking time at all talking about Gallifrey or really doing anything at all interesting with the planet. The first ten minutes gave me such high hopes, which were then dashed completely.

 

So, I loved everything about this for about 3/4ths of the way. Angry Doctor, consequences, the power of being the most infamous Time Lord that's ever existed being exhibited in that the Doctor didn't even have to ask and he was instantly in a position of power after a very swift and unopposed coup.
The Doctor in a position of power is an interesting thought experiment, but ultimately irrelevant because it's not in his nature, he who is in essence a runner. I fully expected him to run about the time he did.

Also, please, enough with the female Doctor setup. We get it. God.

I liked Clara's part during most of the episode. It felt powerful emotionally, decently-acted, and had the right mix of epic and desperation in it.

Then the final few scenes happened. My fucking god but Shielda has the magical ability to fucking ruin every episode she's in. Holy fucking shit am I mad.

The Doctor got basically tricked into forgetting his problem, fixing nothing, and now there's a loose Tardis with zombie Clara and fucking Shielda of all people, who should have been left to rot back in a shitty viking village after nearly getting her people killed.

God fucking dammit.

 

Spoiler

I see nothing wrong with Ashieldr getting her own TARDIS. I actually quite like the idea! Another immortal character that could pop up, although she may never will. What I don't like was Clara's ending. I... I'm not even gonna explain that one.

Showing The Doctor as the Lord President and him in Gallifrey for the first b10 minutes of the episode was amazing. Then, we forgot about it all. Let's hope it is explored more with the next season.

Also, I don't care about Time Lord sex change or whatever but man, am I gonna miss Ken Bones as The General. I really liked him in his two appearances.

 

Spoiler

I enjoyed that episode. I went into it with the expectation of Gallifrey shenanigans but halfway through we start to get a character piece.

In terms of Gallifrey, I don't mind that we didn't get much of it. It's a setup more than anything. We got to see a glimpse of their society, what they think of the Doctor and more importantly we got it back. Now Gallifrey can be fully part of the show and show up all the time and we can have Time Lord stories. Which is great!

A lot of people complain about Clara getting a drawn out farewell are forgetting that what happened last season was terrible as a farewell. Death in Heaven was a good dramatic element to force conflict and create a change in the dynamic of the characters but it would have been frustrating and would have lacked closure if it really was Clara's farewell. Which is why I'm glad they brought her back in the Christmas episode. Face the Raven though was pretty great and would've served as a perfect conclusion to Clara's story as a logical end to her character progression throughout this season. This episode is also great in these terms, it just flips the tragedy angle from her onto the Doctor.

Also what amazing acting. Capaldi is perfect and Jenna Coleman just keeps getting better. I'll miss her and Clara.

I never realised how beautiful Clara's theme is.

 

I loved the last two episodes, I really did. They provided what I consider a proper sendoff for Clara and one of the best performances I have seen on tv.
That is why I do not understand why they dropped the ball like that. Usually, this amount of effort in regards to a character is only given when we get a new doctor, not a companion. Perhaps Clara is really popular in Britain, I do not know. Here in Greece Doctor Who is not that popular so I cannot really say what most people think. This episode showed signs of decency, not greatness in the first 10 minutes, but it all went downhill from there. We got another iteration of the Time Lord Victorious, as if that is ever gonna stick, and then it is a half hour bundle of needless emotion shoved down our throats.
All in all, a really good season but with a very bitter aftertaste.

 

This episode confused the hell out of me. Why were all the High Gallifreyans kowtowing to the Doc? Ppl in power don't like losing it. How does "extracting" Clara from one point in time still result in her death? What the hell was the point of the "ghost computer"? Was that woman in the barn the Doc's mother? If so, why is she still living in a barn...since all of Gallifrey has such a massive Doctor boner.

On the plus side though...such an emotive episode. Clara's theme is divine, and Capaldi and Coleman are so very good at pulling off sorrow tinged with desperation...in a very restrained (British?) way. I love it. Quota of Feels for the night met.

 

Okay, I've had some time to think about it, and now I feel like I can better explain why I didn't like this episode and what I wish could have been done instead.

Firstly, I want to just say that I've not watched any old Doctor Who (that is to say, anything before Nine). This means all I have for context for Who -- and, by extension, all of the information I've been given about Gallifrey -- comes from New Who. This means that my perspective on things is often different from the perspectives of people who watched the earlier series. For example, when the destruction of Gallifrey was retconned, I felt like it was a massive unraveling of the character development the Doctor had gone through over the past eight years or so. Others on this forum found it to be more of a return to classic Who values, having found the Doctor's use of the Moment to destroy Gallifrey and the Daleks a betrayal of the original character.

I have come to terms with the fact that the destruction of Gallifrey was retconned. I also, before this episode, was extremely hyped to see Gallifrey, and more, to see the Doctor return to Gallifrey in this towering rage that had been built up so well over the past few episodes. For me, the exciting part about this return is all of these emotions the Doctor has toward the Time Lords and Gallifrey really coming to a head.

For the first ten minutes or so, this was exactly what I got. As the Doctor walked across the desert of his homeworld, I was reminded of Eastwood's The Man With No Name. I'm still not sure if this was intentional homage or not, but if it was, it seems rather apt.

The Doctor's return to what seems like his childhood home was very interesting. The look of slow realization on the woman's face as he turns to face her is beautiful and almost a little heartbreaking, as if she's been waiting so long and is afraid to believe his return is real. This is precisely the way I like to see exposition done -- showing, not telling. The scene was left ambiguous, and the place the Doctor returns to could have been anything from his mom's house to an orphanage, which gives nice leeway for future writing to flesh it out fully.

The show of near-reverance in the next scene is intriguing; we know, of course, that he commands an almost cult-like following elsewhere in the universe, but it's interesting to see that even on Gallifrey, among his own people, he is still regarded almost a messianic figure.

When the military shows up to collect him, Capaldi's fury is tangible, despite not yet having said a word. The image of the Doctor advancing on a warship and forcing it to back up is almost as badass as watching him draw a literal line in the sand -- and seeing everyone who visits him thereafter actually respect it.

This is where I believe the direction of the show could have been changed for the better.

We saw a few episodes back that Capaldi handles the Doctor's trademark impassioned monologues brilliantly, his speech in the otherwise mediocre Zygon two-parter one of the highest points of his Doctor Who tenure. In that episode, Capaldi truly sold the pain and regret of an old man struggling to prevent others from repeating his mistakes.

I believe the show would have been far better had it stayed on Gallifrey, and centered around the conflict between the Doctor and the Time Lords. The primary sources of conflict here are the Doctor's imprisonment in the confession dial and his disgust with the war crimes of the Time War. This episode could have followed up the Zygon episode in theme -- where that episode dealt with preventing a war from breaking out, this episode could have been a brilliant condemnation of the conduct of the Time Lords. The two episodes would be thematically related from a bookend perspective: in the Zygon episode, the focus is on a potential war, and in this episode, the focus could have been a war that is long over.

Potential for other plotlines aside, I should discuss what we were given.

I see tossed around a lot (not necessarily on DLP, but on Reddit and other places) this idea that people hate this episode because it's Clara centric. This is not really correct, in my case. My main concern is that Clara had a sendoff. A good, poignant one. It completely undermines the emotional impact of that sendoff to drag it out even further, particularly when it's done in such a confused and weak manner (for example, was this is even a sendoff, or just a contrived resurrection story?).

The idea of an extraction chamber is actually kind of interesting. Being able to pull people from their timestream for a limited amount of time is clearly a very powerful ability and shows some of the strength of the Time Lords. Sadly, this is almost immediately undermined as the Doctor uses it to pull Clara from her timestream and leaves with her after being warned that if he does so, time will break.

This is, in my opinion, a really serious misstep. Aside from the Doctor, the Time Lords are really the only people we know of who can be any kind of authority on time travel in the Who verse. Beyond which, as old as he is, his people are immeasurably older, and it stands to reason that somebody, at some point, would have tried to use an extraction chamber to save a loved one and found out exactly what happens. When the Time Lords are shown to be incorrect, and there are no real consequences for reviving Clara, this hugely diminishes our regard for the Time Lords, and suddenly it's hard to regard them as the heavyweights you would expect the Doctor's people to be.

This honestly reminds me a lot of those old Indy!Harry fics where Harry uses dark magic despite being warned by basically everybody that it's a really bad idea, and somehow he uses it and is completely fine. It's used in those fics to make Harry look smarter or stronger than people we regard as 'heavyweights', like Dumbledore, and in Doctor Who, it's just being used to make the Doctor look smarter than the Time Lords, who we regard similarly.

It's bad writing in fanfiction, and it's bad writing in television.

Moving on, Ashildr shows up again in this episode. I've really wanted to feel invested in the character, but it's honestly been something of a struggle. My issues with immortality pills aside, detailed earlier in this thread, Ashildr hasn't really had enough screen time to make us care about her. She pops up now and again, but the Doctor doesn't really seem to care much about her, and that makes it harder for us to care about her, since we see the world through his lens.

I was particularly surprised to find her at the end of all things with him. Four knocks, and somebody with the Doctor at the end of the universe -- surely there could be no better person to be on the other side of that door than his oldest enemy and, perhaps, closest friend, Missy. I understand that Ashildr is there partially because of the prophecy, but I still feel that it's a bit odd for the Doctor to have this big life-defining chat with someone he frankly doesn't even seem interested in getting to know, based on past episodes.

I refuse to even comment on the idiocy of the whole memory wipe situation, other than to say I'm not sure I've even seen anything more contrived and complete shit greenlit for television, and I used to watch SyFy.

I genuinely feel like the first ten minutes and the rest of this episode were not even written or conceptualized by the same people. The first ten minutes were brilliant, and the remainder resembled nothing so much as poorly written fanfiction, and everyone who supported this stupid concept should feel horribly, horribly ashamed of what they've created.

 

I'm not sure if focusing on the consequences of the Time War would fit within this episode since after the previous two it needed to be about how the Doctor's deals with Clara's death. It could be handled differently, but ultimately it needed to be the main theme. Still, what you described is something that would be a really good episode in the future. The Trial of the Time Lords where they're all (including the Doctor) hold accountable for what they did in the war.

I agree with that. It always feel cheap when they put a newly introduced character in situations where you expect someone more important to the Doctor and the viewers to show up. Missy would be a definitely good choice, but when he said 'me' I really wanted it to be a future Doctor, probably hidden in the shadow though it would be a really unexpected introduction of the next one, and not Me.

 

You've been reading too much Naruto/Harry Potter fanfiction about the Council/Wizengamot. This is Gallifrey, these people are logical and rational. They know that no matter the situation, the Doctor is the best person to solve the problem.

Also, the Doctor won the war and fought beside many of the people, they all respect him.

Extracting Clara would have worked if the method of he death hadn't been from the Raven. The word Chronolock was thrown about a bit. What they essentially did was they took Clara out of that timestream a second before her death. She will eventually have to go back to that point and die.

I think the barn is a place where initiates of The Academy go. A way to toughen them up I think. That woman probably isn't the Doctor's mother, just his teacher/caretaker while he was an initiate himself.

 

To an extent, I'd agree with this. I've always rather agreed with the idea that the Doctor doesn't want to go back to Galifrey so much as he doesn't want it to be gone. If it is now returned, I can easily believe he wouldn't want to stick around, so if they'd had the episode centre on the return of Galifrey before closing with the Doctor going off travelling again, I'd have been fine with that. Basically, I just thought what they did was a waste.

To be fair, we don't know for certain that there haven't been any consequences yet. That could be the plot of series 10. And if it isn't...well, I'd be quite happy to sweep the whole thing under the carpet.

Obviously, my biggest problem with the episode was that it was Clara-centric, but only in the sense that I felt that it both undermined her death (which, lest we forget, was her third exit scene in 12 episodes!) and provided an unsatisfactory climax to the arc plot they'd built up. I do wonder whether part of the reason we got the climax we did was that Moffat realised he didn't have a proper conclusion to the plot line when all was said and done. But I'll concede that if the Hybrid is an ancient prophecy that the Doctor has been running from his whole life, it might take more than a single series to convincingly deal with it. I'll come back to the Hybrid in a moment, more precisely what I'd have done with it, but I'm going to waffle about Clara for a little longer.

I've come to realise today, as I've thought this over, that Clara is in many ways Moffat's answer to Rose Tyler, which I realise isn't necessarily a radical revelation. But there are a number of parallels to Rose.

1. They're both perfectly normal, 21st century young women. This sometimes gets obscured with Clara due to the whole Impossible Girl thing, but that's all timey-wimey shenanigans.

2. In a moment of crisis, they choose to do something incredible to save their friend. For Rose, that's absorbing the Heart of the TARDIS to travel back through time, wipe out the Dalek Emperor, resurrecting Jack etc. For Clara, it's choosing to jump into the Doctor's time-stream so that she can scatter herself throughout his history to save him at critical points (bonus parallel: both of these events are founded on complete nonsense bordering on deus ex machina).

3. They both become crucial to the Doctor's life and personality. With Rose, she's (as far as I'm aware, not being a huge buff on pre-revival Who) the first companion he's fallen in love with (and debatably only). With Clara...well, a fragment of her tips the First Doctor off as to which TARDIS to take, she inspires his whole creed as a child, and that's just for starters.

4. They've both cast a long shadow. Martha is generally regarded as one of the weakest companions, but IMO that's largely because the Doctor spends most of her series wangsting over Rose. Clara's shadow is a little different, because she's been on the show for the whole time, but certainly in the sense of staying on past a sensible and emotional climax.

5. They were both last seen in the company of a Hybrid. Clara going off in a TARDIS with Me, Rose with the Meta Crisis!Doctor. Half human, half Time Lord.

Can you see where I'm going yet? I'll come back to it.

Let's talk about the Doctor's Confession Dial. It's first presented to us as the Doctor's last will and testament, so presumably he wrote it - or whatever the appropriate term is. But we also learn at the end that Rassilon manipulated it into the torture chamber of 'Heaven Sent'. How? It's been in the Doctor's pocket since leaving Skaro, and as far as we know, he went straight into it after 'Face the Raven'. At no point between those two events was it out of the Doctor's possession. But it was out of his sight in between writing it and leaving Skaro. It was in the possession of Missy.

Now on one level, this can be seen as a bit of an idiot ball. Why would he give something like that to one of his greatest enemies? Well on the one hand, as Missy says in 'The Magician's Apprentice', her relationship with the Doctor is far more complicated than simply enemies. On the other, the Confession Dial is presented as something almost sacred to the Time Lords, so she probably wouldn't meddle with it. On a random third hand, we know that whatever the complexities of the Doctor and the Master's relationship, Missy at least feels somewhat fondly towards him, wanting her friend back. Couple that with his need for someone more dangerous than Clara to help his double bluff against Davros, and it makes sense for him to get Missy involved by sending her the Dial.

Unless you assume that it's an error of judgement, and she actually did do something to it. Perhaps she altered it to be the torture chamber, not with the intention of of getting the truth about the Hybrid, but to get the Hybrid itself.

The way I'd have written it, we'd find out that when Missy left Galifrey, she went via the parallel dimension, and picked up the MC!Doctor, who, lest we forget, was banished to the parallel dimension due to his war like behaviour. He hides out somewhere while Missy heads off to Skaro with the Doctor and Clara, making her alterations to the Confession Dial. The Doctor and Clara head off doing their thing, while Missy makes a deal with Me.

The Doctor does his thing in the Dial, as Missy could cheerfully predict he would. This opens the way back to Galifrey...and therefore the Hybrid can fulfill the prophecy or die trying.

 

Hey guys, anyone know any good Dark/Vengeance!Doctor Fanfics? Preferably without Rose or River Song.

I really want to read a fanfic where the Doctr cuts loose (Not evil, just dark) and shows his full power. We always get fanfics where Harry's personality changes from good to grey to dark but the Doctor's always stays the same.

Also, this si gonna sound stupid but are there any good TIime Travel stories? As in the Doctor gets transported into the body of his 9th (10th?) self just when he met Rose? Or even into his first body?

 

I love that the fanon penis joke is now full canon.

 

Oh yeah, I remember that. I still like to think it happened off screen though.

 

I'll grant you that Rose was, but Clara was clearly foreshadowed and demonstrated with the Great Intelligence just moment prior.

I'm still ambivalent about the last episode. On one side, I think it undermines Clara's death which was a brilliant end to her character. We had seen her become more and more reckless as the series progressed. In a sense, I think since Danny's death, she kind of wanted to die, but she knew the doctor would always save her; which led to this recklessness and ultimately her death. So yes, I felt that Face the Raven was a fantastic send off to the character.

However, Jenna's acting...was freaking amazing as always. The pair of them, Capaldi and Coleman, were just awesome. That scene in the Cloister, where Clara learns that the Doctor was in the confession dial for 4.5 billion years; I think it was one of the best acting I've ever seen from Coleman. And that acting between the two characters is what seems to hold this last episode together, without such strong acting I think I would have felt that Hell Bent was disappointing.

Spoiler

As for the ending, when you realize that it's the doctor who has lost all memory of Clara because the mere thought of losing her brings him to extreme he should've never contemplated. It's amazing. For a moment, I thought they were going to pull another Donna Noble and I was horrified. I was never a fan of Donna Noble, for various reasons, but when she got mind wipe, it hit right in the feel. But Clara? Dear god, I love Clara and seeing her horror at the realization of what the Doctor wanted to do, I couldn't help but feel the same.

On another note: Clara's theme is beautiful.

 

Maybe those fanfics have colored my expectations, but I don't think that's the case here. These people locked the Doctor up in his own personal hell instead of asking him a simple question. They are the furthest thing from rational and logical.