Expanding ‘Hell Bent’ (2016)

Originally written on June 13, 2016 as part of a discussion about how successful Hell Bent was as ‘a return to Gallifrey’ and whether it could have been improved on. In the intervening two years I’ve come to appreciate the episode more for how it sidelines Gallifrey, but I still salivate at some of the ideas I proposed in this overly excitable rant, so I’ll include it here – with some criticisms and thoughts I have about it now added at the bottom.

Rewriting ‘The Lie of the Land’

Originally posted in a discussion on August 22, 2017. This slapdash affair was approached with the aim of tweaking the entire Monks trilogy (which, let’s be honest, should never have existed in the first place – Extremis would have been fine as a standalone) but ended up putting all of the focus on retooling TLOTL while maintaining the major beats of the sequence.

Extremis:
It transpires that the simulated Doctor has been using all the repeated simulations of his painful death to perform a Heaven Sent move, slowly hacking the system a little more each time until his sunglasses are able to contact their real-world counterpart.

Twice Upon A Time: a hallucination?

Originally posted in a discussion on December 28, 2017.

Reminder that TUAT was a regenerative fever dream (think Circular Time) and took place entirely within 12’s mind, he never left the TARDIS after the end of TDF.

• Misremembers his old face (and personality)
• Captain plotline is retroengineered from his memories of the Brigadier and Kate, just like Moff retroengineered it from the existing lore
• Testimony plotline literally only exists so he can see ghosts of his lost friends, his subconscious constructed the whole narrative
• There is no baddie, just his internal struggle
• His memories of Clara return to him because the regenerative energy is resetting the damage
• Winds up in a battlefield symbolic of his own life

---

It needs work, still need to figure out how Rusty and Helen Clay fit in, but it feels right doesn’t it? Mainly just because the ep is structured a bit like a dream already, a series of strange experiences that happen just so the Doctor can sort out his feelings.

Though it’s mainly just me trying to make up for the fact Moffat never did the Timewyrm Revelation ripoff I always wanted him to do, where we’d go completely inside the Doctor’s interior landscape (think the TARDIS scenes from Heaven Sent, but a whole world inside his mind).

---

[January 29, 2018]

“We live inside a dream…”

“I hope I see all of you again. Every one of you.”

Titles for Nonexistent Seasons

Attempt 1 – 26 September 2017

1. Double Lives
2/3. The Sapphire Girl / Dead Metals
4. Cryptomnesia
5. The Doctor’s Face
6/7. Sanction of the Daleks / Welcome to Hell
8. The One Who Looks
9/10. You Aren’t Real / Antimatter

Attempt 2 – 10 October 2017

1. Voice of the Fire
2. The Facemakers
3/4. Speak No Evil/Tell No Lies
5. Witch House
6. Dirt Under Daleks
7/8. Coda / The Exit Mask
9/10. The Flesh That Hates / Purgatorio

Attempt 3 – 31 July 2018

1. Don’t Look Back
2. Code of the Crypt
3. Meet the Hatemerchants
4. Mercury’s Kiss
5. Zero Room
6/7. Vote Dalek / Undead World
8. Two Truths and a Lie
9/10. The Forgetting Box / Heart Disease

Deleting TUAT

Originally posted in a discussion on July 3, 2018.

Series 10 is like one of those albums that would have been better as an EP with like half the tracks removed

[…]

---

Hot take: Thin Ice is a more necessary inclusion than TUAT.

[…]

---

If you delete TUAT entirely but leave the ending of TDF (with 1’s appearance) as it is, jumping straight to 13 falling out of the sky at the start of S11, 12’s regeneration becomes the defining unsolved mystery of NuWho and arguably more kino than what we actually got purely by its sheer absence.

The brief David Bradley cameo becomes the most analysed and interpreted scene in the history of the show, with everyone trying to unlock the symbolic clues to what really happened. How much of it was real? Was it a vision of his former self guiding him to the beyond? Is the callback to The Tenth Planet a hint that 12 accepted his fate? Does the lack of a true “regeneration scene” for 12 mean he actually died and everything from S11 onwards is a dying fantasy? Which Doctor actually regenerated into Whittaker, if any? Was Moffat choosing to mirror 12 with 1 (“the original, you might say”) as a reflection of how little the Doctor had truly changed pre-13? Is 1’s altered facial appearance a sign that this is actually the true Doctor and the one we’ve been following all these years is a doppelganger?

Twice Upon A Time as a hex upon Chibnall

Copied from a discussion had on July 29, 2018.

In a few years people will realise TUAT was a pre-emptive strike against Chibnall in the same way TEOT was against Moffat, but far more sophisticated.

A whole episode about the Doctor having become exhausted with the show endlessly dragging on, accompanied by a fraudulent resurrected image of Hartnell espousing a toxically dumbed-down “good vs evil” approach to the premise, a storyline virtually devoid of event, and nothing that actually convinces 12 that he should carry on with life other than him randomly deciding to in the last few minutes.

The sensible argument against 12 in the episode is that he isn’t seeing the full picture and there’s still more new value that can be found in life if he changes his perspective, i.e. gets a new showrunner and regenerates into a woman for the first time. Happy ending, right?

Now imagine how utterly and irreparably SUBVERTED that answer becomes if the ensuing era is the bland, safe, approval-seeking wasteland of vacuity that Chibnall will probably deliver purely for the sake of prolonging the IP’s monetary value? In other words, exactly what 12 was scared of in the first place? By the end of S13, when Chibnall has failed to rise to Moffat’s challenge, we will have learnt that 12 was right all along.

---

[From a few minutes later]

Please note I don’t actually think any of it was intentional (as entertaining as that idea is). I don’t think RTD deliberately set out to undermine Moffat when he wrote “some new man goes walking away and I’m dead” then had 10 randomly visit every single fucking character. But the dark well that is the end of a showrunner’s tenure – the need to mine out a justification for a sense of finality and a last big statement about Doctor Who when everything has already been used up by prior seasons; the naturally low stakes when someone else is already prepared to take over – seems to have a habit of unearthing these inadvertently fatalistic drives within the show, a subconscious loathing of what it might end up becoming if forced to continue.