Doctor Who 9x12: Hell Bent

Here, at last. Clara Oswald gets her proper departure from Doctor Who. Unsurprisingly, Face the Raven was not her final moment but more of a set up for this episode. It's not completely surprising, since it would hardly be in character for showrunner Steven Moffat to let a character just die. As with plastic Centurion Rory and ghostly River Song, his characters continue to hang on after they leave the mortal coil.

The last we saw of the Doctor he finally returned to Gallifrey. After two series of searching this felt like it should have been a more momentous occasion but since the Doctor was out for revenge on those that killed Clara and trapped him in the confession, there was little time for any sense of wonder. The Time Lords come across as the usual pompous bores while their soldiers are so casual as to seem banal. Rassilon, who was superbly played by Timothy Dalton in The End of Time is here played as a ranting lunatic. The Doctor brings down Rassilon and the High Council in so little time. In a way it feels like a dull prelude to the more interesting main plot, which is an out of control Doctor tying to save Clara. After bringing her back from the extraction chamber, the two go on one last run, with the Doctor hoping to hold back Clara's death. Peter Capaldi gets to show a raw Doctor, determined to do whatever. From shooting the Time Lord General to stealing a Tardis and flying to the end of the universe.

His troubles lead him into conflict with other immortals including Ohila and Ashildir. It is Ashildir, living at the end of the universe, who has a perspective on the true nature of the Hybrid. Despite all of the teases that it might be a half-human Doctor, or Ashildir, Steven Moffat found a third, more interesting option. The Hybrid is both the Doctor and Clara, egging each other on until they cause chaos. Such a symbiotic relationship is a nice callback to the nature of Osgood discussed in The Zygon Inversion. The only problem is that we never really see this idea put into action. Clara has spent most of this series on the sidelines, and here there's not enough time to show the damage they are causing to the universe. In The Wedding of River Song we got to see the physical fracturing of time as River failed to kill the Doctor. There's nothing like that here, and that's a pity.

The final scenes between the Doctor and Clara in the retro Tardis were good. While the Doctor is prepared to wipe Clara's memory, Clara brings up the less savoury side of this endeavour. Something that there wasn't much time for in Journey's End.

The scenes of the amnesiac Doctor meeting the knowing Clara in Nevada were decent enough. They formed the final goodbye. Ultimately Clara leaves the Doctor to go and travel with  Ashildir inside their old Tardis.

While the episode became a bit of  a muddle in the plotting area it was superb in how it was directed and presented. Rachel Talalay has now replaced Nick Hurran as Doctor Who's best contemporary director. She succeeds in making the Gallifrey scenes feel like a western. Composer Murray Gold is also on form with a brilliant soundtrack of western sounds and synthesizer stings.

Overall it's not a bad episode but not brilliant. It is pretty much the self-indulgent episodes of the show to date, but hopefully this is clearing the decks for something new and exciting. Right now we have the Doctor, in the Tardis, with a new sonic screwdriver that's even more suggestive looking than before. He can go anywhere right now. There's an exiled High Council that might get revenge, or a question of the Doctor's interest in Earth. It remains to be seen which direction Steven Moffat will take.

7/10