Get Off My Planet. Doctor Who: “Hell Bent”

“It turns out that the Doctor heard about the Hybrid prophecy in the Cloisters from the wraiths there, and this is what led him to steal a TARDIS and run away.”

I missed that part. I don’t really see the cause and effect there. Also, how does it reconcile with his theft of the Hand of Omega, as established in “Revelation of the Daleks”?

I don’t think the Hybrid issue was unresolved or is due to return, because the nature of the Hybrid doesn’t really matter. It was a prophecy, and prophecies are notorious for only being as powerful as the reactions people have to them. The prophecy was actually quite benign — that the Hybrid would simply happen to be there at the end of Gallifrey and the universe — but the Time Lords interpreted it as the Hybrid causing the end of Gallifrey and therefore panicked. So the Hybrid isn’t actually what’s important. The only important part is how people misread and overreacted to the prophecy. We got the answer to the mystery, which was that the prophecy was misunderstood.

And the Doctor actually said that he didn’t keep the secret of the Hybrid’s identity because it needed to be kept from the Time Lords, but because it was a means to the end of reaching Gallifrey and resurrecting Clara and/or punishing the Time Lords for killing her. So the secret didn’t really matter at all.

“In addition, we have now witnessed a regeneration where a Time Lord goes from white person to a black person.”

We’ve already seen the reverse, when Mels regenerated into River Song in “Let’s Kill Hitler.” Although she wasn’t strictly a Time Lady. We’ve also seen a Time Lord change race in “Planet of the Spiders,” when the apparently Caucasian K’anpo regenerated into the apparently Tibetan Cho Je, although the latter was a white actor in yellowface.

(And I always figured that Romana was able to try out multiple bodies because her regeneration wasn’t stabilized yet and her body was still in flux, like the way Ten could grow his hand back. The Doctor’s never been able to choose his form consciously, but I figure Romana had some special training or just a greater natural self-control.)

Meanwhile, I just have to say…. HARTNELL TARDIS!!! AAAAHHHH!!!! It looks beautiful. An Adventure in Space and Time did a fairly good recreation of how the set would have looked in real life, but this is basically a more refined execution of how it’s supposed to look in-universe. It worked remarkably well for a 52-year-old on-the-cheap design.

Also, Lady Me gave a bit of a nod to the McGann movie and the claim that the Doctor is half-human… and the Doctor neither confirmed nor denied it.

Too bad they couldn’t get Dalton back as Rassilon. I was confused why the Doctor was after this random old guy until he said his name. I know that Time Lords regenerating between stories to explain actor changes is a tradition going back to Borusa, but it could’ve been handled better (and cast better).

@11/Ursula: But that’s just it — the prophecy does not say that the Hybrid can destroy space and time. It simply says that the Hybrid will stand over the ruins of space and time. The Time Lords thought that meant it would cause their destruction, but they were wrong. The Hybrid — whether it was Me, the Doctor, or the Doctor/Clara gestalt — just happened to be there at the natural end. They mistook the witness for the murderer.

@12/Longtimefan: “Using the term normal indicates that being in the non preferred gender may be less wanted.”

Err, isn’t that kind of tautological, seeing as how “prefer” and “want” are synonyms? Anyway, the General’s statement is only informative about the General’s individual opinion on the issue. She probably just meant “normal” because she’d spent most of her life in female form and thus that felt more natural to her. I don’t take it as saying “I’m back to what society as a whole defines as normative,” just “I feel more like my usual self again.”

“Aslo, would it have been as well received if a woman had changed into a man and said the same thing?”

Probably not, but that’s exactly the point. The General was an old white guy, exactly what we expect of a military leader, and then the General turns into a black woman and considers it more normal rather than less. And that subverts and challenges our stereotypical expectations.

@14/ellsworthj: Perhaps the Mire tech interfaced with human cells in an unusual way, or the Doctor’s jiggery-pokery altered it in some way.

And the Face of Boe did die. If that was Jack, then we know his life did end. And we know Jack does exist in the current iteration of the universe, since the Doctor mentioned him to Lady Me.

@19/Walter R. Moore: No, it doesn’t make it “okay.” It wasn’t supposed to be “okay.” The whole point was that the Doctor was going too far, that he’d become so obsessed with saving Clara that he lost himself in the process. He even said outright that he couldn’t be the Doctor all the time — he’d basically reverted to his War Doctor mode and was essentially waging war to save Clara from the Time Lords. And once she realized that, she wanted nothing to do with it. Yes, it was out of character, and that was the point. His refusal to let go of Clara led him to choose to be out of character, to stop being the Doctor on her behalf. And she didn’t want that. That was what Missy wanted — to give the Doctor a companion who’d resonate with him so perfectly that losing her would push him over the edge into chaos. So Clara recognized that she had to break their bond if he was to become the Doctor again. That’s why her final words to him on the blackboard were “Run, you clever boy, and be a Doctor.”

This has been a theme throughout the Moffat era. “The Doctor” isn’t his name, it’s a role he adopted, a promise he made to himself and to the universe. Being the Doctor is a choice. And that means he can choose not to be the Doctor. But when he does, it’s the wrong choice.

@22/AlanBrown: “The situation with the Doctor beating his way through a diamond wall over billions of years, only to arrive in a Gallifrey that only recently experienced the Time Wars, made no sense at all.”

Well, it is Gallifrey. It’s a planet that’s always kind of existed outside of time; in the original series, all the Doctor’s visits to Gallifrey took place in chronological order from his point of view no matter how he jumped around in time. That is, he never visited the Time Lords before any of his previous visits. He, the Master, and the Time Lords always seemed to be in sync with each other no matter how much they jumped around history.

And the Doctor did say that the Time Lords deliberately hid Gallifrey at the end of the universe. That means they moved it there, probably as their way of escaping from the dimensional pocket they were trapped in. So the elapsed time from their own point of view was a lot less than four and a half billion years. (By the way, that should be nowhere near the end of the universe, so maybe he didn’t entirely go the long way round.)

@36/MGM: I was going to point out that each iteration of the Doctor in the confession dial had no memory of his previous iterations, so for him, he only went through it once. But then I realized… each successive copy could see how far into the future he’d come, how many skulls had accumulated, how far he’d penetrated the wall. He would’ve figured out what was happening by the end. So this last Doctor, the one who got out, would know that he’d been reliving this ordeal for billions of years, even if he didn’t remember it. And that’s got to have some impact.

@44/Athreeren: “Admit it, you did that on purpose.”

Did what? Used the word “companion?” Yes, my whole point was to illustrate the symmetry between Clara and Me here and the Doctor and Susan back at the beginning (and more broadly the Doctor/companion relationship in general).

@46/Athreeren: But she’s played by an 18-year-old actress.

@48/intothebreach: “In fact, a little before the one minute mark, you can see him do the exact same thing he did in this episode, shoot another time lord.”

Well, yes and no. Actually he was trying to save that particular Time Lord from being assassinated, and he was trying to shoot at the assassin. But the rifle was sabotaged so that he would miss the real assassin and be framed for committing the murder. So, yes, he was trying to shoot a Time Lord, but not that Time Lord, and it was an act of defense rather than aggression.

@50:GiGinge: I’ve been rewatching Hartnell’s run lately, and it’s surprising to discover what a fighter the First Doctor became in the second season. In “The Rescue,” he has a whole big one-on-one fight with the villain of the story and holds his own pretty well. In the very next story, “The Romans,” he has a whole fight scene against an assassin, and in “The Space Museum” he overpowers a captor and turns the tables on him, though it happens off-camera. We think of the Third Doctor as being the first one to be a martial artist, and I often wondered when he learned these combat skills he suddenly started showing off, but now I realize that the First Doctor was quite the skilled hand-to-hand fighter despite his age.

And the Doctor was rarely portrayed as that much of a pacifist in the original series. He generally preferred to solve problems nonviolently if he could, but he rarely managed to do so, and the villains almost always ended up being killed, often through the Doctor’s own machinations. He was rarely reluctant to persuade others to fight for him, either. Way back in “The Daleks,” the Doctor convinced the pacifistic Thals to go to war against the Daleks, mainly because he needed their help to retrieve a vital component of the TARDIS. He seemed to have little patience for pacifism at the time. I think that aspect of the Doctor’s character emerged more in the Third Doctor’s era, perhaps influenced by the tenor of the times or by producer Barry Letts’s Buddhism. Even so, the villains were still usually defeated by force.

@52/Philippa Chapman: Oh, whoa. Maybe it was. Although the Doctor said here that he remembered the diner being on the other side of the hill or ridge, so I assumed it was a copy of the original diner nearby. Still, Who knows…?

@58/GiGine: That’s a tough question to answer for a couple of reasons. One is that quite a few First and Second Doctor stories were erased by the BBC, along with a bunch of other videotaped shows that they thought nobody would ever be interested in again and could be taped over. (Videotape was expensive.) A number have been recovered from film versions shipped overseas, and there’s always hope of finding more, but a large percentage of the first two Doctors’ stories don’t exist except in audio form (because fans tape-recorded the episode sound off their TV speakers), or in fan-made reconstructions combining the soundtracks with still photos taken during the production of the episodes, or sometimes with alternative image sources where photos aren’t available. Those are available online, and in my current rewatch I’m including them in sequence and finally seeing them for the first time.

The other tricky consideration is that the show has been so many different things over the years, changing in character and approach. Hardly any of the classic series is all that similar in style to the modern series, except maybe the last 2-3 seasons. And the Doctor we know now is different in a lot of ways from earlier Doctors, since the modern series delves more into exploring his deeper psychology.

Personally, I think it’s all worth watching, to see the evolution of the series’ ideas and approach and the history of early TV production. But that takes quite a lot of patience and investment of time. I suppose if you’re just starting out, it might be worth starting with the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee. That was when the show went to color, and when it took a turn to a more action-oriented format. For most of that span, the Doctor was exiled to Earth and working as UNIT’s scientific advisor, so that’s the time when you can get to know Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Kate Stewart’s father), though he and UNIT were introduced in a couple of Second Doctor stories (which don’t exist in complete form but have been released on DVD). Also, the Time Lords were first introduced in the Second Doctor’s final story, but they were explored more from the Third Doctor’s era onward — for instance, the Master was introduced in Pertwee’s second season, and Gallifrey was first named in his final season (in the debut story of Sarah Jane Smith as his companion, which was also the debut of the Sontarans). It’s also in this era that the series’ finest writer, Robert Holmes, becomes a regular staffer, although he did two serials in the Second Doctor era.

Although a lot of people would recommend starting with the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker. He’s often regarded as the best classic Doctor, and certainly had the longest run. His tenure featured the classic “Genesis of the Daleks,” which featured the debut of Davros and was probably the best Dalek story in the original series. It also gave us our first real visits to Gallifrey and developed Time Lord society a great deal; a lot of stuff in “Hell Bent” was derived from the Tom Baker years, including the Sisterhood of Karn from “The Brain of Morbius.” And it had the franchise’s first season-long arc, the Key to Time storyline. But I feel that starting with Baker is sort of starting in medias res, because his debut episode opens with the familiar UNIT characters reacting to his regeneration. That was my first episode back in the ’80s (and a lot of people’s, since that was the first time the series was aired nationwide in the US), and it was kind of a confusing beginning. Pertwee’s debut worked better as a soft reboot and stepping-on point.

Still, the first two Doctors’ stories are worth checking out eventually. They lay a lot of the groundwork for the Daleks and Cybermen (there are no Cyberman stories in the Pertwee era and only on in the Tom Baker era), and the Second Doctor’s era gave us the Ice Warriors. And I think there are few better companions than Ian and Barbara in the first two seasons. The original four-member team had a lot more character interaction, drama, and humor than the later dynamic with only one companion. And Barbara was the most impressive, courageous, intelligent, and classy female companion that the Doctor had in his first decade. Plus the pure-historical stories that they did as every other serial in the First Doctor’s era were often quite well-done and engaging. The sadly lost “Marco Polo” is a grand epic with great set and costume designs that regrettably only survive in photos. The mercifully complete “The Aztecs” is a really good drama and the show’s first exploration of the ramifications of time travel and whether history can or should be changed, and it’s probably Barbara’s best story. “The Romans” is an entertaining farce with some nifty character work, the show’s first all-out comedy (although it falls short on historical accuracy), and “The Crusade” (only half of which survives) is beautifully scripted and acted, as if the TARDIS crew has stumbled into a lost Shakespeare play about Richard I and Saladin.

(Although you have to be patient with the primitive production values, which are more like a live stage performance than the cinematic style of the modern show. Frequently flubbed lines, cameras bumping into scenery, limited visual effects, obvious backdrops, slow and talky pacing… it’s kind of an acquired taste, though I’m intrigued by it.)

@60/Transceiver: Not to discount your criticisms of Ten’s regeneration and “farewell tour,” but I found it interesting how “Heaven Sent” sort of retroactively explained the Doctor’s delayed regeneration there (and in “Planet of the Spiders,” really) by establishing that even a dying Time Lord body was very slow to shut down and could linger for a long time. When I heard that line, it immediately felt to me like an attempt by Moffat to rationalize the anomaly of Ten’s grace period before regenerating.

And I did read that essay to myself in the Doctor’s voice, but it was Hartnell’s Doctor. ;)

@66/Russell H: That’s true, but Hartnell was still in very poor health for his age, what with his smoking and drinking. In the DVD commentary for “The Romans,” the actor/stuntman who fought with Hartnell in that episode points out that it was necessary to choreograph the fight very carefully so that it wasn’t too demanding for Hartnell. It was only a few months earlier that Hartnell had been injured in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and had to miss an episode, because another performer carried him down a ramp too quickly and stumbled off the end of it, causing Hartnell to land rather hard on a camera base or something.

And of course he did eventually grow too ill to continue in the role, which is why regeneration was invented. So in a sense, we have Hartnell’s frailty to thank for the open-ended longevity of the series.

And yes, I did watch “The Web Planet” recently — though unfortunately neither Netflix nor my library had the DVD, so I had to watch it on Hulu and didn’t get to see the documentaries or listen to the commentaries. Which is a shame, because they might’ve been quite interesting. “The Web Planet” is widely considered one of the worst Hartnell-era storylines, and I can see why. The ideas were ambitious, but the execution was very clunky and the whole thing turned out to be rather dull. Back in the day, when my PBS station showed the serials in “movie” form complete in one night, I found this one to be excruciatingly boring and awful, my least favorite early serial. Rewatching it recently, I found it more palatable, perhaps because I could watch just a couple of episodes a day. I do appreciate the attempt to create genuinely alien creature designs and cultures, and the worldbuilding is kind of cool. But the execution falls short of the concept.