Bent Sent

On resolving the schism within the Capaldi era’s most famous duology.

The bends

Hell Bent offers us a new account of what happened one episode prior, in Heaven Sent. Not only do we learn that the Doctor was punching his way out of the confession dial for a couple billion years longer than we previously assumed, but – in his own words – he was doing it all for the sake of bringing Clara back to life:

CLARA: The Hybrid, what is it? What’s so important you would fight so long?
DOCTOR: It doesn’t matter what the Hybrid is. It only matters that I convinced them that I knew. Otherwise they’d have kicked me out, I’d have had nothing left to bargain with.
CLARA: What were you bargaining for?
DOCTOR: What do you think? You. I had to find a way to save you. I knew it had to be the Time Lords. They cost you your life on Trap Street, Clara, and I was going to make them bring you back. I just had to hang on in there for a bit.

This comes as something of a shock for multiple reasons. The main twist is that, rather than a noble effort to protect a dangerous secret, the Doctor was apparently pursuing the nakedly selfish and even corrupt objective of undoing death, risking the very web of time to resurrect Clara in an unnatural new form. It suggests we, as viewers, were deceived as to his ulterior motive from the outset. Thirdly (perhaps not so obviously), there are specific parts of Heaven Sent that make far less sense in light of this information.

Some of it is easily reconciled. A couple of soliloquies from the Doctor imply he doesn’t specifically know who his captors are; you could just say he’s pretending so his plans aren’t uncovered. More vexatious are the things the Doctor doesn’t say out loud, but says to himself in scenes set within his very mind. To begin with, two lines that only fit with the ‘defending a secret’ version:

DOCTOR: You see, the problem is, Clara, there are truths that I can never tell. Not for anything. But I’m scared and I’m alone. Alone, and very, very scared.

DOCTOR: Easy. It would be easy. It would be so easy. Just tell them. Just tell them, whoever wants to know, all about the Hybrid.

Then, potentially the most problematic of all, at the Doctor’s most vulnerable moment he nearly falters in his plan altogether:

DOCTOR: But I can remember, Clara. You don’t understand, I can remember it all. Every time. And you’ll still be gone. Whatever I do, you still won’t be there.

Somewhat difficult to square with the idea that he not only knows that Clara can be revived, but that he knows exactly how to do it and it will become possible if he breaks out of the dial. If it was just an extremely well-acted (imaginary) ruse, then for whose benefit? If the Time Lords were reading his mind, it follows that they’d know it was a lie in the first place. And if he’s lying to himself, as some kind of coping mechanism, why isn’t it the one we already know he uses (his ‘duty of care’)? No, the episode practically demands we take the Doctor more-or-less at face value here, otherwise its emotional arc falls apart. And with an episode this revered, that’s kind of a big deal.
The notoriety of Heaven Sent comes not only from being an ingeniously conceived puzzle and solution, nor just from being a tour de force in acting, direction, music and editing – but from its depiction of a titanic emotional struggle stemming from the Doctor’s grief. Moffat elaborated in 2016’s Doctor Who Magazine #502 on how this concept shaped everything:

Essentially, l was thinking, ’What is grief? How do I make grief the monster of the week in Doctor Who?’ I thought, ‘People always talk about grief as being alone,’ so I made the Doctor absolutely alone. Grief comes and finds you every time you stop or rest, so I gave him the Veil. And grief is waking up to the same pain every day, and trying to smash through it, so I gave him a diamond wall to punch for the rest of time, Basically, he wore away a mountain with his tears.

Immediately upon witnessing Clara’s death, the Doctor is plunged into a haunted castle bereft of life, he’s surrounded by skulls, tasked with digging graves and evading a walking corpse, and then caught in a cycle of repetitive, seemingly futile torment. “It’s funny, the day you lose someone isn’t the worst. At least you’ve got something to do. It’s all the days they stay dead,” he reflects, as his imprisonment in the castle appears to stretch on and on. When he finally wavers, the loss of his companion weighing too heavily for him to undertake the unthinkable trial ahead, his imagined projection of Clara gives him the admonition that frames the whole story:

CLARA: Doctor, you are not the only person who ever lost someone. It’s the story of everybody. Get over it. Beat it. Break free. Doctor, it’s time. Get up, off your arse, and win.

The montage that ensues – the defining sequence of the episode – is set to an instantly iconic, swelling, triumphant soundtrack. We see countless cycles of the Doctor hurling himself against the impenetrable wall, dying, and rebuilding himself, edited together so as to gradually reveal that he’s in fact making a dent, and then tunneling all the way through. His victory against the impossible is framed with furious enthusiasm as a victory over his grief, the force that threatened to undo him: he’s not only managed to carry on fighting, but he’s successfully fought through hell and emerged on the other side. It’s obvious straight away why this episode resonates with so many. “It’s the story of everybody,” it says, stressing that the Doctor’s fight is one we all share, and his resilience is something we can all take inspiration from…

And then Hell Bent, it would seem, backpedals, making out that this was not the story of the Doctor overcoming his grief but, in truth, succumbing to it in a way far worse than we could have foreseen. This isn’t something we can simply cope with by saying, “well, in Heaven Sent we only witnessed one full cycle out of many billions, so maybe the Doctor’s motivations changed on a later cycle that we didn’t see”, not just because that’s a feeble defence anyway (it still concedes that Sent‘s heroic montage is eliding the unheroic element of the story) but because it defeats the point of why Hell Bent is doing this in the first place. Likewise with any attempt to theorise that the Doctor’s simply lying in the Cloisters, which would destroy the thrust of that scene. The second episode specifically reacts against what we see in the first. When we look past the mere logistical contradictions, we arrive at a conflict of ideology.

Return to sender?

“Get up off your arse and win,” the Doctor pictures Clara saying. “Get over it. Beat it.” The language is adversarial, even brutal. A point raised more than once in Series 9 is that the Doctor compulsively searches for ways to ‘win’ any situation; here, we see that followed through in how he picks himself up and bruteforces his way out of the prison – and the encouragement of phantom-Clara is the pivotal moment that gets him there, restoring him to his badass and empowered self. In other words, her logic seems to be vindicated, and the hero of the show defeats in battle the monster-of-the-week that is grief.

But if it’s vindicated here, the following week Moffat abruptly turns on it. When the Doctor is finally confronted by the real Clara about what happened, the idea of him torturing himself for such an unimaginably long time elicits not pride but horror and sadness. Tearing up, she seems to grieve in her own way what the Doctor’s devotion to her has done to him.

A now-deleted tweet from Moffat highlights the deliberate contrast between the two Clara sequences.

CLARA: One question. And you will answer. How long was the Doctor trapped inside the confession dial?
OHILA: We think…four and a half billion years.
GENERAL: He could have left any time he wanted. He just had to say what he knew. The dial would have released him.
(Clara turns back to the Doctor.)
CLARA: Four and a half billion years?
DOCTOR: If she says so.
(Clara drops to her knees.)
CLARA: No. Why would you even do that? I was dead! I was dead and gone. Why? Why would you even do that to yourself?
DOCTOR: I had a duty of care.

As we’ve discussed, it feels as though what they’re talking about isn’t quite the Heaven Sent we watched, but we’re forced to confront that the Doctor’s mental projection of Clara back then was a sheer delusion. Of course she would never have wanted him to go through this on her account (or run around lasering Time Lords for that matter) – her final words to him in Face the Raven were an order that her death should cause no needless, excess suffering. Yet everything about Sent‘s framing of the story gave the impression that there was some unspecified need for the fight, that the Doctor was saving the day, winning rather than losing.

The issue here, of course, is that grief isn’t a monster-of-the-week that one can ‘win’ against; it’s something that one learns to manage and coexist with. The suggestion in Hell Bent is that actually, turning your grief into a ‘battle’ is unhealthy. Pushing yourself to operate at 100% when you’ve just been bereaved is irrational, like telling someone who’s just lost a limb to go back to work. It’s an absence of self-compassion; a denial of self-evident problems that crosses over into madness. In this telling, the Doctor throwing himself into a compulsive, overwhelming, ritually masochistic project isn’t a strategy for dealing with his grief…it’s part of the grief, a corrosive side effect. The grief-monster isn’t simply the castle, the Veil or the diamond wall – it’s what the Doctor himself becomes when set against them. This is no conception of grief as a convenient, satisfying TV narrative structure: it’s something far, far truer to the messy human experience. The Doctor is more of a person because we confronted his fallibility like this.

So where does that leave Heaven Sent the episode? What’s the endgame here? We went on that journey with the Doctor, believing in his version of events, and the result was a legendarily cathartic hour of television that’s often considered a highlight of the entire show (perhaps even 2010s TV, period).
Turning all of it upside down like this seems to betray the foundations of what made it a success. Hell Bent has been accused of other betrayals, of course – it pointedly averts the giant Gallifreyan epic that the whole Hybrid storyline pretended to be leading towards, and it rejects the proposal that Clara’s attempt to embody the Doctor in Face The Raven should be frustrated by something as mundane as death – but those were merely refuting fan assumptions. This is different. This would appear to attack the whole basis on which Heaven Sent functioned to such acclaim. The heroic narrative of the Doctor is undermined; the glorification of his self-sacrificing tendency is unraveled; the entire premise of the Doctor undergoing ‘the story of everybody’ is trampled on, because when our loved ones die we can’t lay siege to Gallifrey to try and revive them. No matter how much we may want to.

Extend Heaven Sent directly into Hell Bent and, without fail, the carefully crafted emotional affect of the beloved ‘shepherd’s boy’ montage falls apart, now cast in an alienating toxic light. But attempt to take them as standalone episodes in their own vacuums, and you lose the nuance afforded by their contrasts, the full scale of the characters’ journey; you’re left with dangling squibs, reductive versions of the two.
Could there instead be a third route? A way to get the best of both? How might we arrive at a read of Heaven Sent that acknowledges Hell Bent‘s critical eye without just imploding?

Answer: the episodes are cheating. So we cheat.

Don’t bend, ascend

What does ‘cheating’ mean in this context? Cheating at what?
If we treat the confession dial ‘twist’ as an ideological rugpull – where a story deliberately starts setting up a certain kind of narrative, then averts it in favour of an aesthetically contrasting alternative, as if to say, “you don’t need that story again, you fools…THIS is the kind of thing we should be doing instead.” – then points of comparison emerge throughout Moffat’s era, since it’s arguably one of his favourite tricks. (You can trace it at least as far back as Press Gang.) I already mentioned the Hybrid arc and Clara’s survival being two ways in which Hell Bent manifests this pattern. Elsewhere, A Good Man Goes To War sees the promise of a grand avenging battle deflated in favour of a promise to heal a family. The Doctor’s apocalyptic last stand on Trenzalore, as portended by The Name of the Doctor, gets rewritten two episodes later into a simple, stubborn act of Christmas kindness. Listen has us asking if the Doctor’s fear of the hidden is justified or irrational, but concludes that to pursue the question is to shame the most natural feeling in the world. And so on. You know the score.

But these all contain something that the confession dial rugpull lacks. In each case, Narrative B emerges from the same terms as Narrative A, and the critique is of our collective inability or unwillingness to imagine B (and see its advantages) while waiting for A to happen. To illustrate: A Good Man Goes To War opens with played-straight bravado, bombast and exploding Cybermen, but there’s nothing to actually stop you thinking that going to War might be the wrong move here. (In fact, by that time Pandorica Opens had already done groundwork for the Doctor’s cosmos-scorching theatrics being a source of trouble.) When we hear recounted the grim fate of the future Doctor, supposed warlord, on the grave-planet Trenzalore, we already know that ‘time can be rewritten’ and it doesn’t have to play out that way at all. The moment Twelve tells Rupert that ‘fear is your superpower’, and joins him in warding off what could just be a bedspread, it’s possible to see that he’s giving others the assurance he cannot give to himself. And anyone paying attention to Clara and the Doctor’s story, come Witch’s Familiar, can tell that an alleged Gallifreyan/Dalek doomsday weapon is not the kind of thing that can meaningfully resolve what exists between them.
The potential for B is already there before it fully reveals itself – B is what happens when we diverge from the path of A. And this is a requirement if B is to convincingly illustrate the weaknesses of A by comparison, rather than merely be its own separate entity from the get-go.

The cheat, then: for reasons we’ve already outlined, Heaven Sent is not designed to contain the implicit potential for Hell Bent‘s revised take on it. The idea that Clara even can be resurrected (minus a heartbeat), let alone that it’s the Doctor’s whole objective, or that he could have easily walked out of the confession dial on day one with minimal consequences – all of it is 100% new, unforeseen information introduced by Bent, and actively contradicted at various points in Sent, arguably by Sent‘s whole emotional arc. We didn’t misread Sent. We aren’t being called out for ideologically-driven assumptions we made about Sent. There wasn’t some glaring clue we missed, so to speak. All we did was trust the narration of the show itself. What Bent‘s Cloisters scene performs isn’t so much a narrative-substitution as a retroactive narrative replacement.
It feels like it ought to be critiquing us and Sent – it’s stridently critical of the Doctor, and Sent was all about the Doctor being this great big impossible hero. But the fly in the ointment is that Sent‘s narration cannot be taken as reliable for the purposes of Bent. When we take Bent‘s version as the ‘truth’, it follows that Sent just lied to us for the sake of being a satisfying yarn. And there may be something important about that…it’s a whole episode that seems to operate within the Doctor’s head, one that begins with his extra-diegetic voiceover, one in which he later says he’s ‘nothing without an audience’ and glances at the camera. These aren’t serious markers of untrustworthiness, but they could form the beginnings of a case for Sent not quite inhabiting Bent‘s plane of existence.

Furthermore, Bent or no Bent, people are still going to be watching and talking about Heaven Sent on its own, as its own unit. All the elements of the episode ensure that this will remain the case. It fulfils its stated aim of ‘grief as monster-of-the-week’ to virtual perfection. Fittingly for an episode about a repeating cycle, it’s enormously rewatchable – far from something made to be overruled and dismissed as misdirection, it’s sheer TV pleasure, ticking confidently from one sequence to the next like the elaborate clockwork mechanisms that pervade its setting. All of it uninterrupted by even a hint of Bent‘s upcoming negative re-frame.

And sans the re-frame, sans the new information, with its own narration taken at face value and treated as internally consistent, Sent has positive takeaways of its own. Moffat writes, again in DWM #502:

[…] a guy I know wrote to me and said that his wife had died very recently. And then he had to sit through the Doctor punching the diamond wall in Heaven Sent, and ‘It’s all the days they stay dead’.., but he wrote this long email to me about how important that was for him to hear. ‘The day you lose someone isn’t the worst. It’s all the days they stay dead.’ What he said was, ‘It’s nice that somebody gets that it’s shit’. lt‘s just shit. That’s what losing someone is like.’ “So I think we did something worthwhile there.

The exhortation of the Doctor to ‘beat it’ and endure the impossible, despite his immense suffering, may be unrealistic but – if we accept the episode’s internal pretext that it’s what he must do, for whatever reason – it could be simple, self-sacrificial heroism. It could be kindness. For the Doctor, that’s just life. In Moffat’s popular quote about the importance of a hero like the Doctor, he mentions that “heroes tell us something about ourselves…heroes tell us who we want to be”. To phrase this maxim of his another way, heroes exist to do the things we probably can’t, but wish we could. They provide a space for imagining extreme versions of our own hopes, struggles and desires.
To pick an example – is it a bad thing to imagine Clara’s radical choice in Kill The Moon, risking all of humanity for the sake of a cosmic miracle, even if it’s something none of us would likely imitate? By extension, is it bad to want a bravery like that the Doctor seems to display in Heaven Sent? Can we not take inspiration from the thought of Sherlock [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Rupert Murdoch [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]?

Certainly within the logic of Series 9 itself, Clara wanting to be like the Doctor gets her killed…but the fact she misjudged the risk doesn’t mean it was an evil thing to want in the first place, and soon Hell Bent completes her transformation in its own weird and dangerous way. In Series 8’s Into The Dalek, the Doctor’s anxious over whether he’s ‘a good man’, and Clara concludes the point is that he tries to be one, not whether he always succeeds. In short, the show isn’t shaming anyone for failing to fulfil these idealised concepts of perfect resilience, perfect bravery, perfect morality. Nor is it pretending that they can truly exist outside of fiction. So if a story about an alien undergoing an eternity of mourning his dearest friend, but pushing on through life in her name, offers strength or comfort to those in direst need – who are we to go against that? Why not instead try to preserve that ideal while simultaneously respecting its distance from reality?

At last – the solution!

Sent to be bent

Neither episode need be invalidated or exposed as a sham by the other. There is a way for them to both exist together at their fullest. The key (namely, the cheat) is the idea of Heaven Sent as unreliably narrated, perhaps even by the protagonist. By being a selectively presented version of the events in the confession dial, Sent depicts a heroic ideal – specifically an idealised version of the Doctor.

This should start ringing bells; one of the earliest and most important recurring themes in Moffat’s run on the show is the duality between the ideal of ‘The Doctor’ and the Doctor’s actual self. It was seeded as early on as The Beast Below (‘I murder a beautiful, innocent creature as painlessly as I can. And then I find a new name, because I won’t be the Doctor any more’), played an important role in the 50th anniversary arc, was raised again in The Witch’s Familiar (‘I came because you’re sick and you asked. And because sometimes, on a good day, if I try very hard, I’m not some old Time Lord who ran away. I’m the Doctor’), and is peppered throughout Hell Bent. To ‘be a Doctor’ is an ongoing project, something that one continually chooses to strive for, and – as with being ‘a good man’ – that’s the point. That process brings forth the heroism and wonders.

The fact the Doctor can’t always live up to the ideal he aspires to doesn’t make the ideal worthless. Far from it; persisting with the ideal is what makes him better. Falling short is a mere inevitability of personhood, but the desire to be better is how we improve. The danger lies not in wanting to be ‘The Doctor’, but in refusing to acknowledge the natural presence of obstacles, our shortcomings, our human foibles and frailty.

CLARA: Why? Why shouldn’t I be so reckless? You’re reckless all the bloody time. Why can’t I be like you?
DOCTOR: Clara, there’s nothing special about me, I am nothing, but I’m less breakable than you.

ln this light, Hell Bent doesn’t tarnish Heaven Sent, but restores a necessary dualism by introducing the ‘reality’ to Sent‘s ‘ideal’. It introduces a new truth, one in which the Doctor’s weaknesses and selfishness are on full display, and it contextualises Sent‘s uplifting narrative as one of the ideal Doctor that the real one failed to truly embody. He did technically achieve something wondrous (punching through diamond, overcoming the impossible, subverting the manipulations of the Time Lords) which, if he’d remained ‘The Doctor’, might have been a force wholly for good. But conspicuously in Bent, when his self-interest comes to the fore, he overtly relinquishes the mantle of Doctor as represented by his classy velvet coat:

CLARA: What happened to your coat? The velvety coat. I liked that one, it was it was very Doctory.
DOCTOR: I changed it.
CLARA: Why?
DOCTOR: Well, I can’t be the Doctor all the time. […]
CLARA: Tell me what they did to you. Tell me what happened to the Doctor.

He too is ‘breakable’, ironically enough; he can’t sustain the performance in the face of that much suffering, because he’s a person and not a mere narrative function. Yet he still can’t quite accept that imperfection of his – instead, he tells himself a different kind of lie: that it was all part of his ‘duty of care’ towards Clara. In avoiding the simple truth that he just can’t let go of her, he’s again denying recognition of his own weakness. Within the ideal of a ‘duty of care’ there is a profound and noble expression of love, but when used as a means of denying reality, it becomes something destructive.
This reminds us why the duality is so crucial. A mutual relationship between the desire for something better, and the compassionate acceptance of our own limitations. If we remove either side of the equation, we can only make ourselves worse.

Sent and Bent, then. In the final zoom-out, what’s the big picture? Rather than two stories doomed to contradict, each with parts that must be ignored for the other to make any sense, one lavished in adoration at the expense of its traitorous sister – or indeed as a single unbroken block wherein the first chapter is no more than a bluff, an insincere authorial shell game – we can view them in tandem by understanding Heaven Sent as a story within a story, and Hell Bent as the turbulent history behind that inspirational legend. Independent yet interwoven. Such as it is with stories and their tellers, texts and their writers, ideas and their thinkers, roles and their players, the Doctor and ‘The Doctor’.

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