A Few Thoughts on the “Hybrid”

I’ve already talked a bit about Doctor Who’s fabled “Hybrid,” which was part of the big series 9 arc, and I’ve already made it clear that I’m not much of a fan of the plot.  However, beyond the (IMO) sloppy execution of the mystery and my general aversion to the existence of prophecy in a frickin’ time travel show (didn’t like it in “The Stolen Earth” / “Journey’s End,” still don’t like it now,) there are other reasons the plot bugs me (Hybrid-related spoilers for series 9.)

Now, obviously, the meta reason that we never heard of this super-important, potentially-world-destroying(?) Hybrid prophecy before season 9 is because that’s when Moffat dreamed it up.  I get that, and there’s nothing he can do about it.  But when he establishes this prophecy as going so far back that it may in fact constitute the reason the First Doctor left Gallifrey (more on that in a minute,) it feels really conspicuous that it’s never come up before.  The show tells us that this prophecy is both very old and An Enormous Deal.  It’s so important, it seems, that the newly-returned-to-our-universe Time Lords bribe Me to lure the Doctor onto her street with a mystery and a threat of death to one of his acquaintances so he can be taken captive and what he knows about the Hybrid can be discovered (why is it that the Doctor is their only option for Hybrid intel, by the way?  He got his info from the Matrix on Gallifrey, right?  Why can’t they just look at it like he did?)  It’s so important that they then trap him inside his confession dial, killing him over and over again and looping him through the same time cycle with aim of getting him to reveal his secret (and yet they’re cool with him evidently stalling on this for four billion years?  Is the situation so urgent that they need to torture him to get their information or isn’t it?  And how does the four billion years work?  Is that just within the confession dial itself, from the Doctor’s perspective, or do the Time Lords honestly sit around that long waiting for him?)  In light of all this massive direness, why did they never once broach the subject at any of the many times the Doctor was on Gallifrey willingly (if not generally eagerly) over the in-show centuries of the classic series?  If they need to know so badly, why did they apparently not care until now?

Again, I get that this whole Hybrid business only entered the canon last season, so there’s no real-world way the Time Lords could have asked the Doctor about it before now, but this makes the fictional-world logic completely frakked up.  There either needs to be an explanation for why it wasn’t so vital for them to know then as it is now, or else they can’t be so obsessively, psychotically desperate to know it.  Without either qualifier, none of it makes a lick of sense.

Getting back to One possibly leaving Gallifrey because he was afraid of what he knew… I really, really don’t want that.  Unless I get empirical evidence to the contrary, I’m going to believe that was a lie (and even with empirical evidence, I might need further convincing.)  Messing with the Doctor’s origins is so dicey, and Moffat doesn’t exactly have a careful hand on this front.  The idea that the Doctor fled Gallifrey in fear over this super-important prophecy that has never before come up in the 50+ year history of the show feels so stupid, so small, so simplistic.  I really dislike that.  I prefer to keep the Doctor’s beginning mysterious.  Hints are okay – the suggestion that the Doctor was diverging from the typical Time Lord mindset, the idea that he wanted more than a sterile life on Gallifrey, vague references to running but not why or from what.  But I don’t want to get clear, cut-and-dry “this is why this happened,” and even if I did, this flimsy, half-formed “Hybrid” idea is nowhere near good enough to serve as an impetus for why The Doctor’s story even happened in the first place.