Bent Sent

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

The dark side of loving Heaven Sent (short)

No, this still isn’t the proper Heaven Sent/Hell Bent writeup that may happen at some point (EDIT: it finally happened!), but it’s a step on the way there. Originally posted in a discussion on September 10.

Heaven Sent is in my top 3 NuWho stories but it’s the kind of episode that delights the kind of people who complain about the show becoming Clara Who, think that “politics” should be removed from all art, and demand that everything deliberately comedic be retroactively removed from canon. We spend the whole duration inside the head of a grand old Western man lamenting a woman who’s dead; it might feel radical for Doctor Who but for fiction as a whole it verges on regressive. I often hear from fans that it depicts a “universal experience of grief” but of course it fucking doesn’t; even Moffat’s atheism plays an important role in characterising the tone. Conversely, though, you could show Heaven Sent to a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi and they’d have near zero objections. They might even identify their beliefs with the Doctor’s struggle against the diamond wall.

The fact it’s such a towering work of technical and aesthetic beauty, that deals in abstract philosophical themes such as determinism and the persistence of consciousness, only sharpens its appeal to the reactionary. It reminds them of an imaginary “pure” version of sci-fi that’s able to be incredibly clever, while free of muddy things like crying, camp, and class struggle; that allows certain space to be about feelings so long as they’re stoically expressed and masculine; that can involve women as long as they remain vectors for male desire; that prioritises the triumphant feeling of “winning the day” over worrying about what’s actually being won. This wouldn’t be an issue except we all have an element of the reactionary within us, and part of why fandom consensus fetishises Heaven Sent as The Greatest Doctor Who Story Ever is because it tickles that bit of us so much that we don’t demand any more from it… Hell Bent is more important as a follow-up than people realise, because it counterbalances HS, contextualises it within a wider world, and arguably even undermines its themes, And That’s A Good Thing.
What I’m trying to say is that if you like Heaven Sent you’re basically Hitler.

(Some speculation for next time: is the Heaven Sent/Hell Bent conflict – specifically the disagreement about the Doctor’s motives during the former – actually an enormous, secret narrative substitution being performed by Moffat? Probably not, but we can worry about that when we get there.)