Doctor Who Revisit: Series 9, Episodes 10-12, Now with Spoilers!

As the last few Sunday Who Reviews have shown, it’s nearly impossible to discuss these arc-heavy episodes without spoilers.  It’s all an inevitable exercise in, “Well, can’t talk about that.  Or that.  Or that…”  Now, though, the season is over, and it’s time to hash this out.  We’re looking at spoilery elements from the episodes in general today, saving the larger Doctor stuff and Clara stuff for separate posts.  (Spoilers, obviously.)

Where to start?  I enjoyed seeing Me/Ashildr again in “Face the Raven” and “Hell Bent,” although her characterization is a bit all over the place.  I suppose one could argue that, each time, we’re seeing her so much later in her timestream that whoever she previously was doesn’t matter, as seen in “The Woman Who Lived,” but that’s not really how it feels here.  It feels like the show just does whatever it wants with her, reshaping her to suit their needs of the episode.  That said, setting up a hidden alien refugee camp is pretty awesome, and her conversation with the Doctor at the end of the universe, implausible as that scenario is, is an excellent scene.

All the Hybrid stuff is basically a waste of time.  We don’t really know anything more than we did at the start of the season, including whether or not we’re ever going to hear about this arc again.  I’m annoyed that everything discussed about the Hybrid in these episodes is either a lie or a speculation (although, on that front, I hope the Doctor is lying when he cites his fear about the Hybrid as the reason he originally left Gallifrey.  This plotline in no way deserves to screw with the Doctor’s origin story, and after the retconning in “The Name of the Doctor,” nothing should interfere further with the TARDIS’s account of their beginning in “The Doctor’s Wife.”)  For me, it’s one of the least satisfying season arcs the show has done.  It’s somehow framed as OMG Super Important!!! and completely “meh” at the same time.

I’m also irritated that, after “The Day of the Doctor” rewrote the previous seven seasons of the show and set up the whole “missing Gallifrey” thing, the return of the Time Lords is such a non-event.  There’s no explanation as to how they got back to this universe, no real sense of how the Doctor feels to be home after all the angst/guilt/despair its absence has brought to the new series.  And really, the entire reason for the Doctor being brought back to Gallifrey – so the Time Lords can get his intel on the Hybrid – is 1) not that interesting, 2) ultimately pointless, and 3) nothing more than a way to facilitating the handwavy reason to bring Clara back from the dead.  Cheap, disinterested plot fuel rather than any sort of organic narrative.  On the plus side, the cloister and the cloister wraiths are pretty cool.  It’s one of those things that sort of comes out of nowhere in terms of the show’s history, but I like the idea of the TARDIS cloister bell is rooted to a physical place on Gallifrey (which I suppose supports the theory that, rather than changing the past in “The Day of the Doctor,” the Doctor(s) just closed the time loop that, unbeknownst to him, had always been there – would’ve been hard for the cloister bell to ring if Gallifrey had been destroyed.)  By the same token, I like the idea of the Time Lords’ enemies getting captured and wired into the same system they tried to attack, becoming part of the cloister’s internal security. 

Lastly, I’m of two minds on the cross-gender/racial regeneration in “Hell Bent” (more on the specifics later.)  While I like the acknowledgement that Time Lords aren’t bound to a single race or gender, the continued demonstrations and references with minor and supporting characters really underline the fact that the Doctor himself has never been anything other than a white guy.