Doctor Who Revisit: Spoilery Doctor Edition

You know the drill by now.  Spoilers for “Face the Raven” through “Hell Bent,” focusing on the Doctor today.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first:  the Doctor, after Clara’s death, loses his mind.  He spends four billion years trapped in a confession dial, dying and reliving the same days over and over again, punching a hole through a wall of solid diamond so he can trick the Time Lords into thinking he has the information they want on the Hybrid (so he can then trick them into extracting Clara from her timeline before she dies.)  He shoots an unarmed Time Lord – shoots to kill, forcing a regeneration – because he’s so desperate to protect her once she’s extracted.  He willfully ignores a giant time-breaking Fixed Point because he doesn’t want her to be dead, even though he lectures people on not messing with this sort of thing all the time.  We’re so far beyond the Time Lord Victorious here, it is insane.

I don’t like any of this because it feels so manufactured.  Some of it (like shooting an unarmed Time Lord, have I mentioned that yet?) feels obscene in how horrifically out-of-character it is.  A lot of it is angst on overdrive, Hero!Gone!Dark! drama on overdrive, and just too much Too Muchness.  The one saving grace for me in the whole confession dial situation is that I’m assuming, for the most part, that the Doctor only retains the memories of his last “reboot,” so to speak – that even though four billion years(!) evidently went by, he doesn’t feel them.  Because, seriously?  I know Who angst.  I often love Who angst (sigh – Nine…)  But the Doctor feeling the weight of four billion years spent in fear, grief, isolation, and suffering is more than just a surfeit of angst.  That’s so much angst that it’s hardcore ridiculous. 

But, as often happens with Twelve, even when I hate what the writers are doing with him, I love how Peter Capaldi plays it.  In these episodes, he carries “Heaven Sent” on his shoulders, practically singlehandedly, and he’s just superb.  His grief is raw and ragged, and even as he sublimates it into anger, retribution, uncharacteristic insanity, and horrible last-ditch stratagems, I never stop buying for a second that the Doctor is absolutely wrecked.  Even when other things take precedence, like survival or mysteries, the enormity of the loss he’s feeling stays present, seeping into the edges of everything he does.  I’ll get more into the final depiction of the Doctor-Clara relationship next week, but even if I don’t get why Clara’s death makes him go off the rails and mangle everything he stands for, I don’t doubt how true all of this is for him.

I’m not sure what to make of the final moments of “Hell Bent,” with the more Doctory coat, the new screwdriver, and Clara’s parting entreaty to “Run, you clever boy, and be a Doctor.”  To be sure, it suggests that we’re moving away from the un-Doctor-like “hell hath no fury like a Time Lord in mourning,” but I kind of feel like we’ve done this already.  Last year, there was the whole “Am I a good man?” question that culminated in the Doctor’s season-finale epiphany about himself.  I don’t want to get into a pattern of viewing the Doctor through an increasingly dark lens only to declare, in speeches or screwdrivers, that we’re getting back to business at the very end.  I feel like the good/bad question has been dealt with by now, and so, if the show is going to imply that we won’t dwell on angsty identity stuff next year, I’d prefer that we don’t dwell on it.  Remember having fun in time and space?  Isn’t that nice?  The drama and pain will come, because it always does, but let’s not forget to have fun, too.