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@arbutus  see the Hybrid as the Doctor become Clara-obsessed, Clara-addicted. She gets in your mind and stays there. This allows the Hybrid arc to tie in with the Clara’s death arc

Interesting, that this had to be spelled out.  I think many fans had no trouble seeing Clara as unhealthily egotistical, especially in S8 (that’s what Moffat gets for describing her as a “control freak”, which never made sense to me); but seeing the Doctor as unhealthily obsessed by his feelings about her was more difficult. That “Romance” trope of the woman who enthralls (and, in the process, civilizes or tames) the unruly, dangerous male is very powerful, and very troubling, too.  At least modern people sometimes recognize the difference between love and crazed obsession, enough to ask some questions anyway.

Moffat pushed that story to a very different place, giving us a man whose obsession was making him a potentially disastrous force — and who, upon being called on it by Clara, recognized what was happening and was willing and able to call a halt to it.  Without, by the way, murdering the object of his obsession in order to do so — another  classic ending to this sort of story.  Not bad.

@pedant  we know that Moffat is a fair writer – he plays his tricks to entertain and tease, not deceive.

I think people sometimes mix up his publicity strategies, which do use deliberate misdirection, with his writing and dramatic strategies, which are exercises in skill for the purposes you cite.

– And even though his brain is not as limited as Ashildr’s, there is plenty of evidence that he forgets, even without the help of a neural blocker.

Hmm.  This, I wonder about.  He does talk about deliberately “deleting” memories in his own mind as what sounds like a form of mental housekeeping.  I’m having a chat right now with someone close to me who does have an eidetic memory — much more so that I had realized, in fact, until she wrote a piece about it on the net — and I’m recalling 11, I believe it was, declaring that he remembers (by a deliberate effort of will?) everything, at least about his succession of companions.  I can’t at the moment come up with evidence that he does in fact lose memories by normal forgetting.  What were you thinking of, in writing that?

@bluesqueakpip  the end of the universe can be terrifying and ultimately meaningless (RTD) or it can be something that is sad – and beautiful (Moffat).

That is a pretty sharp contrast — two sorts of romanticism, one downbeat, one up?

@tardigrade  I don’t have a problem with people coming back from the dead and/or having a technological afterlife in some form or other- I just noted that it happened a lot, i.e. to every recurring character that dies – it wasn’t my intention to have an extended discussion

Just an observation here, then, not prodding for more discussion: In a fantasy as distinct from a hard SF universe, the whole issue is thrown onto authorial choice, so that when people object to a dead character nonetheless recurring as an active player in the ongoing story, they’re really making a critical remark about Moffat’s choice to make that happen.  IMO, it pretty much depends on whether a commenter feels that the resulting effect on the story is enjoyable or not.  Give me zombies that are fun and interesting, and I’ll take ’em; otherwise, phooey.

@purosandson  Hi, Son of Puro —  I loved the rich fabric of the music. Mum said “tonal echoes” and I don’t know what on earth she means. She’s reading over my shoulder so I should go and find out!

I loved it too, and “tonal echoes” seems to make sense to me only I couldn’t possibly describe in words just *what* sense, so do please bring us what your mum says it means when you find out, will you.

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@puroandson  Puro solo — Well, if you’re going to worry about your mental health — !!  That’s another matter . . . I wouldn’t want to *have* to listen to it when I really didn’t caret to, mind.  But parts of it are great to walk a couple of fast and energetic miles to.

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@puroandson  Son of Puro:  He already broke all his hearts and that’s not natural. We are not islands but we can’t all be sea either.

No; not while we’re still inhabiting bodies, anyway.  Nicely put; have you come across the concept of the “oceanic feeling” that deep meditation is supposed to (sometimes) produce?  I’ve touched it from time to time, while studying zen Buddhism.  It’s a great feeling, but IMO nobody can *live* there.  Certainly not the Doctor!

@arbutus  something like those re-imagined stories is presumably what the Doctor remembers.

Oh, yes — I think so too.  He might be a bit baffled, though, about just why *he* did certain things — e.g., would he have impulsively resurrected Ashildr in Girl against his own better judgment, if he hadn’t been shoved into it by his fear of the future impact on himself of Clara dying?

I do like the idea that he’s also unhealthily dependent on Clara’s counter-balancing his awkward social and emotional alienness; figuring out what to do, but not knowing how to *be* with people.

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@bluesqueakpip  There is going to come some point, Moffat is saying, where even the Sisterhood, and Clara, and the Doctor, and all the other immortals of the Whoniverse – will decide that it’s time to be gone.

Yeah, you don’t get to unfix a fixed point, do you — not even by taking the long way round.  For me, this is why the whole DW series, the basic idea of it, is dark.  Going darker just means dipping a little deeper below the surface of action and banter etc.  It’s always there, implied and looming: endings.

@arbutus  . . . the read-through, which was the moment when the characters ceased to be the people I had created and became something completely new. Actual humans other than myself reading those lines made such a difference and I always found that hugely exciting.

I think I know what you mean here — I had a similar experience, which led me to gladly give up any idea that I was in control in any way.  I got it that letting go and just riding the ride was the best possible thing I could do for the play, the performers, and for myself, and boy was I rewarded!  Watching the actors re-invent everything (and making it better) just blew me away.  The Director encouraged them to try different approaches, pacing, bits of business, etc. until it all began to take shape, after which his job seemed to be to help make that shape firmer and more coherent.  He was amazing to watch; he’d done some directing at the Met, so maybe his experience with singers and opera added to what I saw as great, and very effective, delicacy with his cast of four.

Coleman said, way back, that Capaldi is “absolutely fearless” and will “try anything”, including settling with her on just how they would play a bit, and then improvising something different in the take that (sometimes, I assume, not always) was better, and that kept her on her toes in the best way.  I doubt that Moffat, or the various Directors, would interfere much in that process between these actors, once it was in motion.  I get that from seeing how happy, energized, and willing these actors seemed to be, on set and off — but of course, they’re *actors*, so who nose, really?  Moffat does seem to enjoy leaving that openness and ambiguity.  Thank goodness.

I can only imagine that the writers who really “let their characters take over” the writing process, don’t do much critical editing afterward?

In fact, the person I’m thinking of most centrally on this issue used to refuse to do a second draft, on the grounds that the characters had already told it right the first time, until editors stopped letting her get away with this.  She’s had a very good, long run, though, albeit producing novels that are too wordy for my own taste.

 

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@whisht  @puroandson  Enjoyed the Glass — too late at night to play it loud, though.  Tomorrow!

Do either of you know Glass’s score for “Mishima”, the film about the poet and novelist who went sort of Japanese-Fascist crazy (?) and committed ritual suicide in public with his followers in attendance?  Fabulous suite of music, and that one works best Very Loud, too.  I used to listen to that while on the treadmill at the gym, until I realized that a) I was going to go deaf if I kept doing that, and b) probably also have a heart attack, so who cares.  It was the ringing in the left ear that convinced me not to do that any more . . . Glass got an award for the suite, but the actual film score not all suited-up is better.  A world-smasher, IMO, and unutterably appropriate to the subject . . .

 

 

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@tardigrade  If he was truly calculating, then the Doctor would have used one of the neural blocks available in that room to cause all the TLs to black out and wipe the last half hour from their memories. He could then have strolled out, 

Well, he could have; but his calculations were over-hasty and heavily tainted by roiling emotions, so what he *did* choose to do works for me.  That’s not to say that there weren’t other alternatives at hand — if he’d cared to consider them.  After those 4 + billion years, I’d say he was primed to kill somebody; pity it wasn’t Rassilon, but the bad choice just confirms the perilousness to all and sundry of this man loaded up and let loose as a loose canon.

Er.  Cannon, damn it.  Though a “loose canon” is one of the more charming and inviting aspects of DW, if only to rattle the cages of the “tight canon” crowd.

Whoo.  Its late.  Can you tell?!

 

ichi

 

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@tardigrade  (Shooting the General) Yes- I think you’re right that’s how it’s meant to play out. But the way it’s set up, it isn’t an act of desperation, it’s a calculated act, and not sold for me as necessary.

That’s the point, IMO: the Doctor didn’t *need* to kill him, although I think what he was calculating was how far the General would go to enforce what he saw as his military duty to take charge of Clara and send her back to the Raven, and how quick the soldiers would be to continue that enforcement if the General died (and regenerated); not very, as it turned out, so he and Clara could run out of there together.  The “normal” Doctor would have talked it over; the “hybrid”, full of pent up fury and outrage, doesn’t think twice about it, a la WarDoc.  That’s evidence for why he and Clara have to part company — so he won’t be moved by fear and anger about what’s happening to her, fall into that kind of icy, calculated violence any more.

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@janetteb  @nerys  I like The Doctor playing the guitar

Me, too — really like it.  It’s a form of meditation for him, I think — better than sitting on his TARDIS in a sort of yoga posture, more like this Doctor than a violin.  CapDoc may be an aristocrat by birth, and he has some of the attitudes and habits of command of an aristocrat, but he’s learned to be a lot more than that, I think, in his travels and experience.  The common instrument of the aspiring youthful musician (of my day, and of Capaldi’s too), the guitar, suits him very well.  Noodling on the violin is, IMO, more abstract — it’s about thinking, perfect for Mr. Holmes.  Noodling on the guitar strikes me as more earthy and concrete, a non-verbal voice of the heart more than of the calculating brain — the Doctor’s music of nostalgia for a long, long past.

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@tardigrade  When it’s clear that Clara’s pulse isn’t returning, the Doctor is agitated in a way that we’ve rarely seen. He certainly seems to be doubting himself at that point, so I have difficulty in seeing him putting in place a plan at that moment.

Let alone a plan that he has developed in anticipation of this no-pulse-return development, which he clearly anticipated as happening, but being easily canceled by a bit of distance travel.  He’s so upset that he loses his temper with Clara and goes on the attack — “Oh, you don’t trust me any more?!”  I don’t believe that he’s even thinking fast enough at this point to set up a plan that reads as A (he wipes Clara’s memory) but is secretly B all along (he manipulates the situation so that Clara wipes *his* memory instead because he’s realized that he is the one who has to forget, not her).

On the other hand — he demanded a neural block “compatible with humans” back in the extraction room, didn’t he?  What for, if he didn’t have *some* plan to use it — on a human?  And Clara is the only human at hand except for Ashildr (does Ashildr count as fully human any more?), and he doesn’t seem to have any cause to use it on Ashildr.

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@puroandson  Damn, I am not deniable, that’s for sure!  I must admit, though, that I have some colleagues who insist on telling their readers, “My characters take over, they tell the story and I just run after them, writing it all down.”  Which kind of puts legs under that nonsense which it does not deserve.  It can feel like that sometimes, but the writer’s job isn’t to be a psychic journalist.  It’s to fasten upon ideas (of character, incident, environment, etc.) and develop them (some rise from your internal psychology, some your mind sieves out of the cultural flow of ideas around you, many from other fiction); and the rest is choosing words, and then editing — carving away the dross to the best of your ability so that the reader doesn’t have to do any of that.

When you turn it over to the public, that text becomes a script in that each reader mounts their own on-going production of the story you’ve laid out, but inside her own mind, fleshed out from *her* life experience, not yours.  Each reader has an interpretation by his own imaginary cast of mental “actors”, and for that person, that interpretation is valid, and also changeable with time and with other input.  As author, though, your own interpretation, the one you’ve crafted on the page, is, IMO, primary and to some extent lays down the parameters of interpretation that can be justified from the text alone.  Cutting out and setting aside the writer’s version as *less* meaningful than those of readers is just plain stupid — bad *science*, is how it feels to me.

On the other hand, I have learned things about my own work from readers who saw something that I didn’t, but that I see as valid anyway; and it’s in the friction of varying interpretation, and the discussions that come from that — reinterpretations in the light of discoveries of influences not seen before etc. — are part of the resonance that keeps a story alive into some part of the future.  Re-visions of established works can be good teachers, too.

That’s how it looks to me, anyway.

 

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@juniperfish  What we can see, for ourselves, as the BBC have released the Hell Bent script, is that the journey from script to screen has added greater narrative ambiguity than a literal interpretation of the script would have delivered. .  . . I think narrative ambiguity is part of the creative design of the show under his [Moffat’s] tenure. . . . Their job is to produce, not to explain

Better than I could have said it; thanks.  And okay, Puro solo, that’s me done with it — unless more brain fireworks occur.

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So — his memory gets wiped instead of hers and drop him off — in London?  That’s where his TARDIS is, but on the other hand, so is Rigsy and others who might remind him, literally, of what he’s forgotten.  Or they don’t worry about that, trust the neural block, and drop him off in London so he can find his blue box.

Only he doesn’t (why not?).  From there he wanders around looking for it, and reconstructing the Clara-shaped blank figure in his memory while composing a song that keeps telling him what he felt about her, although his memories of her remain blank (this can’t be an instantaneous thing, right?).

At some not to much later point, they’re back to check, and see that he’s walking through Nevada, still confused and still grounded.  So they go grab his TARDIS from London (poor Rigsy, when he sees that his monument to Clara has vanished!  Though he might think the Doctor has come and reclaimed it and left in it).  Then they grab the Doctor in Nevada, knock him out, drop him by the road, and flag down a passing truck and ask the driver to take him, when he wakes, to the next roadside joint where he has a better chance of getting his next lift.  Then they move their TARDIS with his TARDIS inside it 30 m. down the road, turn their TARDIS into the diner (how do they know what that looked like in such detail?  Oh — his TARDIS must remember it), and wait.

Oh, am I remembering correctly that waitress Clara turns away to end the diner scene by slipping away to her own TARDIS just when he realizes (out loud) that it’s the diner where he met with Rory and Amy, not Clara.  If so, that’s her signal that all is indeed well: he doesn’t remember her, fine, but the neural block has left his memory in general intact.  (He didn’t know what it would do when they used it.)  So give him his TARDIS and leave him to find his new direction on his own.

She’s just fulfilled *her* “duty of care* to him; so she’s learned that from him, too.

Honestly, this thing is truly *awesome*.

 

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@lisa  “his duty of care” to Clara could continue with out end

because now she’s immortal as TLs are (long-lived but not invulnerable to accidents, extreme events, etc., so ending in death one way or another but probably a long way off)?  Well, that would be a rather daunting prospect for him, I agree.  It can work.

But I’ll stick with the tidal-wave format, myself: the one he began with Ashildr’s resurrection, the one that has wiped his emotional memory re Clara away.  Talk about your consequences!  I’d say that’s some wave!

 

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@morpho  @jphamlore  … it really seems to me that losing Clara personally isn’t what bothers him so much as I read it, it’s his failure in his duty of care – so if he knew she was safe, he’d be OK without her. It’s not say Rose we’re talking, where his loss was much more personal.  [I 100% agree with this.]

Well, he was *trying* to set it up this way, on is how terms: wipe her memory, stash her somewhere on Earth where she could live as a normal human, which of course she absolutely is *not* any more, so that was a very Doctor-doesn’t-get-all-the-implications-of-his-own-actions moment.  Whether he (with his memory intact) would have been able to stay away and leave her to that forgetful Earth life is questionable; the nature of obsession/addiction is that you act on an irresistible impulse toward the thing/person you are obsessed with.  And for me, this relationship has been *more* personal at much deeper levels (Impossible Girl levels) than even with Rose, so I’m thinking no, he wouldn’t have been able to stay away.  When he tells her that he bashed his way through the diamond wall for 4 billion + years because he had a duty of care, that’s patently absurd, IMO.  It’s code for, “Just as I said it would be back in The Girl Who Died, I couldn’t bear to lose you, and I was punishing myself for having lost you anyway.”

*Why* would he recognize a black and white image of her, when he didn’t recognize her actual face in the diner?
Isn’t it that he recognises the image of Clara as the person he met in the diner?

He might, but it would just be extremely puzzling to see the same face that he just saw *and didn’t recognize* painted on the TARDIS.  He certainly wouldn’t respond to the painting with a show of sentiment, because there is no sentiment attached to that face any longer, for him; it’s just the face of a pleasant young waitress who gave him some coffee, for a song.  “Clara Oswald, you’ll always look the same to me.”  But not now.  That deep connection has been obliterated.  I think that’s why they cut the touch-the-face bit: that’s not the meaning SM et al intended to convey.

Son of Puro:  Also he “recognised the picture as the woman he met in the diner”. That. Is. Awesome. It fits the whole thing because he sees but doesn’t ‘see’?

Yes, I agree — he looks at the portrait without visible reaction for a moment, and enters the TARDIS without another glance.  I’m not sure he even remembers waitress Clara’s face enough to identify it with the portrait, though: he’s shown blindness to human faces before, hasn’t he?  And that’s what waitress Clara was to him, a kind and interested human, all the rest forgotten.  But we remember (and can refresh our memories with re-watches).  He moves on into his future, with whomever the next companion turns out to be, never looking back over his shoulder at the triumph that he and Clara (with lots of help from the quirkiness of the universe) brought about between them: giving her her heart’s desire — to become a human TL in her own right, banging around the universe in her own stolen TARDIS.

And thanks for the “public school” connection to the barn; of course.

@juniperfish  Your three points +, #49378 — Yes!  I particularly like #1, It is not the job (or the desire of the more sensible) writers to create narrative certitude.  Especially not in a playscript!  Which is why the first thing many actors do with a fresh script is to cross out the stage directions, so that they can come up with their own moves and interpretations (within limits, of course) with the director.  Although I know some (usually newbie) authors who think it *is* their job to do just that.  It infuriates them to find that publishing a text means letting go of exactly that kind of control.

@mudlark  So he clearly retains not only a detailed memory of what happened, he can remember his motives for acting in relation to her, and from that he has been able to deduce her importance to him, even though he is now emotionally distanced from what he felt at the time. It is as if, when he tries to focus his mind’s eye on the memory of Clara herself and anything personal that she said to him, there is a blind spot, although everything else is clear.

Ah; yes, I missed that, thank you.  Selective is right!  The man who begged her to *see* him and who always *saw* her, looking right past the face to the inner being, is now blind to exactly that kind of seeing, but only in respect to her, his Clara no longer.  It’s like he’s permanently (?) wearing sonic sunglasses set to delete the emotional content of the “Clara” outline in his story.  Gawd.  What a very sophisticated barbarism, the careful cauterization of an essential part of the soul — and he was going to do that for (to) her . . . for the best of reasons, of course (clever boy — it’s worked, the only way it could have worked — on him, instead).

@bluesqueakpip  Thanks for that analysis from the actors’ point of view.  I remember being told that the first thing many actors do with a new script is cross out the stage directions, so that they can come up with their own physical and emotional flow through the story, in concert (one hopes) with the rest of the cast and the Director.

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@puroandson   I don’t get this closure thing people talk about. Why? We don’t have closure in life. bad things happen and we think “I wish I’d said this to a person before they died and I never did”.

Son of Puro: No, we often don’t get “closure” for traumatic events in our lives; but we know that if you don’t at some point disengage from the emotional memory of the trauma, the rest of your life is likely to be badly compromised in ways that won’t make the rest of that life easy for you or for those who care about you.  For an extreme example, consider accounts of the lives in Israel of people who survived the Nazi death camps: I’ve read that many of these people remained in the shock of survivor guilt and paranoia for the rest of their lives, and forcefully passed their fears on to their own children.  That was traumatic experience for which no “closure”, I think, was even possible for many of the survivors.  There was a story in a magazine called “Tikkun” a few years ago about how these survivors were often so crippled mentally by their memories that many had to be institutionalized for long periods afterwards.

For the normal losses that life brings, often people have to find or make their own closure, more or less effectively, so they can get back the ability to live in the present, not stuck in depression over past losses.  When my dad died, I wrote a book about what a strange, prickly, and funny person he turned out to be when he lived next door to us in his old age.  I learned some things by that writing, and it afforded me closure (and a lot of forgetting, once I’d made a place besides my own mind to “put” those memories — a book).  Some people create rituals of remembrance that allow them to live the other parts of their lives out of the shadow of perpetual mourning.  We find ways.

As for the Doctor and Clara, they still had a puzzle to work out when they were in the white TARDIS, so the urgency of the situation left them with no time for moping.  They got to do a bit of that later, in the diner, where it was just right . . . sadness, and resignation, and then — okay, now what?!  Clara will go the long way round to where she must end up; the Doctor’s TARDIS will take him where he needs to be.  Big sigh of (rather melancholic) satisfaction, and a lump-in-the-throat goodbye to an epic pair and their tumultuous adventures.

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@jphamore  Moffat in Hell Bent is consciously laying the foundations for what he knows will be the last classic series story, the one that brings together all of the threads of the Doctor’s youth, Rassilon, the Matrix, etc. . . . when it is done, Moffat will leave all possibilities open for the next showrunner to create his or her own version of the Doctor.

I agree that SM is probably well aware of needing to settle some of the DW past and his take on it, to avoid creating a Dead Hand effect on the next showrunner’s choices.

@puroandson  I truly hope my students remember the lessons I teach but when it comes to me, the teacher, there’s a teacher-shaped hole. Not really defined by emotions or thoughts but possibly certain sayings -not actual conversations word for word: concepts not images; the repetition, the rote, not the romance.
Ahem: well, no, not romance. Not that: I’m being metaph….oh stuf….

(No “stuf” now, Puro solo.)  I think that’s pretty much what happens with the way people remember their education, but I have to add that most people *do* in fact remember their more idiosyncratic or charismatic teachers as persons, not just teacher-shaped sources of content.  In my experience, it’s more often the content that slips away . . . unless the teacher was teaching actual skills that the students continued to use quite consciously later in life (like music theory and practical technique that you need when composing or playing a piece for cello, say).

@jphamlore  We may find out as early as this Christmas special whether the Doctor retains the full memory of Clara

Moffat has talked somewhere about the placement of the Xmas special in the Doctor’s life, and it’s apparently well before S9 because River is dead by S9.  His comment is in a recent interview, can’t recall where.  So I don’t think Clara will be an issue at all, one way or another.  I think S10 will scarcely hark back to her at all.  The resolution of S9 is designed to move us all past Clara and into new companion territory (or an older, more casual companion style, if upthread comments about leaving behind the rather fierce intimacy of the Doctor/Clara relationship(s) are correct).  Maybe later on some sort of encounter will happen, rumors of another TARDIS traveler, or stray memories.  But the obsessional bond had to be broken, and I think it well and truly has been by his forgetting.  His closure, IMO, comes from letting go of the fruitless quest for Clara-the-unknown, since the Doctor now has his TARDIS back and can go anywhere in space and time, for any reason.

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@pedant  All those moronic comments about Moffat being lazy, when redshirts really are the gold standard of lazy writing.

It never ceases to amaze me, how ignorant people are of what it takes to do not just creative work, but *good* creative work.  The theme of the “lazy” writer is constantly coming up, and it is nonsense — for writers who are actually writing for a living and getting paid for it!  Truth is, if you’re “lazy” about writing, you’ll end up living on the street.  Which may happen to you anyway, even if you’re nothing of the kind.

Of the end-bit in the script about the Doctor recognizing the Clara’s portrait painted on his TARDIS — Not so sure they cut it, as much as it just didn’t come out when shot.

Yes, never occurred to me; but also it wouldn’t make sense.  *Why* would he recognize a black and white image of her, when he didn’t recognize her actual face in the diner?  Ah — if the their parting is engineered by the Doctor, manipulating matters as he is wont to do, once she was gone in her TARDIS he could stop pretending he didn’t know who she was — no witnesses.  Only I’m looking at that last bit in the antique TARDIS, and as written, there’s a lot more sentimentality there — he stroke her cheeks, he hugs her, etc. — that would support such an idea.  But as it’s played out on screen, when he moves to hug her she pushes his hands away and steps back from him, and there are no teary caresses, for which, IMO, much thanks.  Too much would be too much.

So as the script is acted, that set-up of tenderness is gone — the set-up that would make recognizing the painting later work.  I have a feeling that somehow it became clear that it would be rather demeaning if the Doctor planned it all and manipulated events, and her feelings, to split them up effectively for good.  They’re unequal equals now — the TL and the almost-but-not-quite-dead human who’s turned herself into a version of him at his best: an adventurer with curiosity and eagerness, but compassion for other humans (without cue cards).  Her refusal of his “care”, in the form of “let me relieve you of those dangerous memories”, asserts this.  Her memories are not his to dispose of as part of his strategy for keeping her safe.

He’s not controlling things in the white TARDIS, as he would have to, to pull of that strategy, because Ashildr makes him *tell* Clara what he plans to do.  The two women force him to yield his plan to chance — because he knows women are smart, so he listens to women.

 

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@soundworld  Rassilon and the High Council have been exiled, near the end of time, where there’s ‘only one or two star systems left’. In these ‘end times’ where is there left to actually exile them to?

“They’re on the shuttle,” he says, of the High Council.  Shuttles usually go back and forth between commuter stops or some such, but if there’s nowhere to go — has he simply condemned Rassilon and his gang (in two different vehicles) to die in empty space when their shuttles’ life support systems run down?!  If so, good grief, that’s cold — no wonder he admits to having gone too far!  I note that in the script, they’re put in charge of the Gallifrey Garbage System, which I think was cut because of the wisecrack by Ohila that accompanies that from Ohila, about him being a typical “high born” Gallifreyan who thinks necessary jobs done by lowly folk are punishment, not honest labor for the common good (and a wage).

So — *is* he “high-born”?  I thought it was the Master who began life as the son of a family with estates etc., but we saw young Doctor growing up in and around that tatty old barn . . . ?  Ohila should know, shouldn’t she?

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@tegan   Ok so the doctor has now forgotten Clara completely right? Including all of their adventures etc. But then how does he know anything about himself? He met her as the 11th and regenerated while with her, she has been his companion since the start so how does he know anything about himself

Do you mean how can he remember his own past, that has led him back to Gallifrey, if he can’t remember Clara?  Since she was a central character who played a vital role in all those events?  You have a very good point there — he must remember his own actions, but also that there was this hazy person he can’t quite picture accompanying him and working with him during those adventures.

We’ve been saying yes, he knows a woman was there, but he can’t recall anything else about her or how close and explosive their relationship was.  But if that’s so, then looking back, how does he make sense of his *own* actions in, say, The Girl Who Died?  Anything he did that was motivated by his feelings for Clara would need some other explanation because there no longer any clear reason for him to do it.  E.g., *why* did he break the rules and bring Ashildr back to life with the Mire chip?  He knows better than that, and he *knows* he knows better.  Without the conversation with Clara about that, and memory of the urge to do what he knows is forbidden as a flag of defiance to the TLs and as a sort of run-through of how it would be to do something like that later if Clara died, how does his action make sense?

Clara was a part of almost everything he’s done since he met her!  So if he remembers the events of that period but not the attachment to Clara, the person, how will what he remembers make sense to him?  If he thinks of *her* as an empty outline of an unknown person, inscrutable as to feelings or motives, he would have to see *himself* (in his past) the same way — like a game piece, with no understandable motives of its own, just being moved randomly about by the story.  Two game pieces, closely related in some invisible way that he can never get a grip on?

If that happened to me, it would drive me crazy all over again!

 

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@juniperfish  Very nice.  Clever old Doctor, what a caper!  I just don’t know when he would have time to work all that out while running his maze repeatedly inside the Dial.  Except, of course, in his Mind-Tardis time-outs.

Only Clara was in there.  He couldn’t plot this devious ploy out with her avatar looking over his shoulder, could he?  Except, “I can do anything I like!”  And we’ve seen how that turned out . . .

I do like the idea that he could and would repeatedly run one hell of an agility trial course (losing every time, but winning in the end) while exploring how to “help out” Clara and Ashildr as best he might.  I bought into a version of it for a time (him engineering the use of the blocker on himself rather than on Clara, knowing it wasn’t going to work on a TL since it was specifically ordered by him as “human compatible” and she hadn’t the skills to alter it in an effective way).  But once I read the script for HB, that was out: not the author’s intention, and not really psychologically and emotionally reflected in the story as performed.

Thinking back to the confrontation with Davros, and how the Doctor “played” being so desperate over what he’d seen happening to his Clara when the Daleks “killed” her, I see an interesting comparison there.  When he drops to his knees and begs Davros to save her, the lines, the whole gesture and utterance, seemed to me to be bogus — overblown somehow, a very odd note in performance.

But then he claims that he’d known what D. was up to all along, and had counter-planned, quite effectively (well, except for the getting very very lit up there for a bit while Davros was siphoning energy off him).  So that must have been a *performance* of desperation over losing Clara, deployed to keep stringing Davros along.  And that’s just what it looked like to me.  (Of course, I wasn’t convinced in the slightest that he had figured out every step of Davros’s strategem and though he was grandstanding about that (cat: “Stop laughing, I *meant* to fall off the chair!” — but that’s what re-watches are for.)

Comparing this with those last scenes in the old TARDIS in HB — when her heart won’t start, he’s got frantic desperation written all over him, the real thing.  I can’t fit that to the cunning plan back-story in that case, appealing as it is.  Not that he doesn’t have a cunning plan (he does, he worked it out lying on his cot in the barn waiting for the TLs).  It just doesn’t work as anticipated.  So what else is new in Who?!

@pedant  I wanted a TARDIS before; now I want The Amercian Retro Diner in Space!  Gotta have it.  And somebody needs to give those chameleon circuit capacities an overhaul.  Damn things keep getting stuck . . . !  TLs seem to be very poor at the maintenance end of things, like American Airlines.

 

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@tegan  each time he regenerates he basically has to learn about himself from scratch, he would have done this while with Clara so wouldn’t he forget those memories completely? Or am I completely wrong here?

He tells Clara in the diner that he *does* remember their adventures together — he’s just told her the whole story.  Except that there was this woman with him that he just doesn’t know anything about as a person, just what she did but not the feelings that went with it, his or hers — like talking about him being more polite and understanding about humans, or how angry she got with him in Kill the Moon, and why she got so mad and how he felt about that at the time, and so on.  In Kill the Moon, he protested that that he’d thought he was respecting her by leaving a big decision to her that he though she could handle; she said it sure didn’t feel like respect to *her*, it had felt like abandonment.  My bet is that doesn’t remember that conversation *at all*, but he may be a little more thoughtful next time he wants to hand over a big decision to someone else that he trusts to decide well.  Wherever you are in your life, I suppose in a way you’re the sum of what you’ve learned so far even if you don’t necessarily remember specific lessons.

As you said, it will be interesting to see what, if anything observable, has been changed in him by S8 and S9.

 

 

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@puroandson   Puro Solo — There’s also his failure to realise that some things which are sad and even truly terrible can also be beautiful – which is one of his faults -he doesn’t recognise that and he must learn to.

I think that’s right; he’s got as far, at the end of Hell Bent, as saying of *his* end of the story here, anyway — the memory wipe — “This is right.  I accept it.”  But, beautiful, as well as sad?  It’s Ashildr who insists on that observation.  She’s older and wiser (in experience, since he spent 4 billion + years in the Dial doing it all over again and again, while was out — gallivanting?  Who knows?) than he is now.  Maybe he’ll come round to Ashildr’s view, sometime, but not yet.  There’s still to much of the willful, impetuous, passionate boy in him — not Ohila’s immature jerk of a boy who can’t keep to his own rules, but Clara’s clever boy, I think.  Whether he knows it or not.

Which brings up another point: for all those people who insist that Steven Moffat is anywhere from sexist to a total misogynist, a quetioin: who does the Doctor actually *listen* to in this (and other) episodes: Ashildr.  Ohila.  Clara (always Clara!).  Women.  He listens to what they have to say, and recognizes its worth, usually later on.

Thinking also about that velvet coat, how he puts it on in his regained TARDIS; is it here that some posters have pointed out that “The Doctor” is a title he chose, a role devised by him that he, the doctor, plays?  The coat is The Doctor’s costume; the sonic screwdriver is his main prop.  The tired, dusty old man wondering what the hell just happened is put off, dropped (the almost-War Doctor?) with the old coat, so he can resume playing the man he wants to be (and mostly is).

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@pedant  Thanks for that link to the HB script — interesting, that they omitted the bit at the end where the Doctor *does* recognize Clara’s face, in Rigsy’s painting on the Tardis, and touch it to indicate that *now* he puts two and two together and knows who he was talking to just now.  I bet there were some some discussions about that!

Glad they chose to drop it, because a) it would be awfully sentimental, and b) it would make no sense.  Better that he stays blocked.  As it is, as I see it, he barely registers the whooshing of Clara’s TARDIS departing.  He looks like an exhausted, rather bewildered old man staring at something he barely recognizes — there was no painting on the TARDIS the last time he saw it, so — is this it?  (Ow, so much!  He could hardly wait to see what Rigsy’s next art work would do — and now he does, and he has no idea of who painted it or why, or what it meant).

When puts his hand to the door, it’s almost a tentative gesture; and inside, dead space.  Then the power comes on, the place comes to life (as the Doctor’s powerful mind comes to life, now that the distraction of searching for a person he doesn’t remember is gone), and he returns to himself, to take up his true Doctor-life again.

Damn it.  Reading that script brought it all back, and it’s still both thrilling and painful.  What a fantastic way to end the arc of S8-S9!

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@lisa  I’ve been wondering about whether the Clara ‘thing’ will bleed into season 10? In fact, to my mind it might continue to be an influence until this Doctor regenerates.

My question, too.  I think probably yes, but only in a harkening back to CapDoc as he was in S8 — he might well revert to being more prickly, more guarded, more aloof, as a reaction to what happened when he fell into such close involvement with Clara.  New viewers wouldn’t know what’s behind that, but fans would without a word being said about it on-screen.  If S10 CapDoc has some leftover messes to deal with from S9, such as, say especially vindictive misbehavior from Rassilon and his crew, there might be some mention of Clara, but I wouldn’t expect to see her, or Ashildr either, for a while if ever.

@puroandson  Son of Puro, first, best regards to your mum and hopes that she’s home again soon!  As for this,

This season we saw the most complicated Doctor ever

We sure did!  I absolutely agree — this is why we need actors like Peter Capaldi in this role, who have a great range of expression (literally, with expressive faces, and figuratively, the shades of meaning he can get across with his voice, gestures, the whole presentation), which allows their performance of the Doctor to be so *real*-feeling.  This encourages the writers to write more interesting scripts and take more chances, IMO, because they know the actor can carry it in performance.

Of course, some people prefer the Doctor to be simpler, more like a Superhero or something; so I like it very much when things get complex on Doctor Who in terms of character, not just twisty stories and secret arcs.

Seconding @pedant above; we *come* here for the delights of silly and wrong as well as those of mental fireworks that make us go, “Ah!  Of course!  Why didn’t *I* see that?”  But now we do because somebody else spotted it for us,  so it’s fine.

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@bluesqueakpip  Oh!  Thanks!  See, the ins and outs of these things can *only* be understood via Library Science.

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Damn — the CD player of Rassilon, wasn’t it, playing that stressful modernistic piece, “Torture the Doctor, He Needs it”.

@puroandson  I remember (Son speaking) in Deep Breath when Clara said “I never saw you as a boyfriend, it was never like that” and he said (and this hit me like a wallop) “I never said it was your mistake”.

@morpho   we’ve seen what happens when either the Doctor or Clara choose to call it quits. It never, ever pans out. Even after a memory wipe, he’s still looking for her.

It was right there at the start, along with the determination to resolve his part — the only *real* part, I suspect — in the “not your boyfriend” issue (only he couldn’t, not til Hell Bent).  And again in The Girl Who Died, reviving Ashildr in order to show (whoever’s watching) that he *can* do that and he *will* do that, or something like it, if Clara dies.  He won’t let go.  But by the end of Hell Bent, when he comes up with his final plan to wipe her memory as he did Donna’s, and she refuses — her refusal stops him cold, thank goodness.  If you think of her as the person he’s obsessed with, it’s a positively creepy idea to take her memories of their time together from her *while keeping his own*.

“What am I doing?” he says.  Yet the consequences of doing nothing are unacceptable, now that he sees them clearly.  So he yields to necessity.  Which is why when they use the blocker together, for that moment they really are equals. He’s given up control, and so has she, and each gets what they need out of it: freedom.  [Obsession is a form of slavery, after all, especially after you’ve realized how it limits both you and your obsessee.  Er.  Beg’r’pardon, all.  There’s a reason for the phrase, “the object of his/her obsession” — at some crucial level, the obsessee is in fact reduced to an object.  This — per @morpho, . . .  what Clara chooses to do at the end was not what he had in mind: his plan was for her to live a peaceful life out of the way on Earth — makes this perfectly clear, and is the core of what he must give up via memory wipe so they can carry on their separate lives.

That moment of using the blocker seemed so small and quiet; it looks much bigger to me now.  (It’s also a kind of response, isn’t it, to the Fisher King, who callously stole people’s deaths for his own use.)

@mudlark  . . . it would appear that the hybrid was not a hybrid in the normal sense, but the synergistic convergence of two beings of similar temperament and complementary character, one Time Lord, one human

You put that in clearer focus for me, so thanks.  Now, can we all pass the hat and take up a collection to pay the Meddling Monk’s library fines?  As @blenkinsopthebrave relates it, that brouhaha has gone on long enough.

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@jphamlore  Wow, you have an amazing imagination — wonderful bonkerizing, rich and strange!

if this is their standard of collective decision-making on issues that potentially affect the fate of the universe, this does seem to be another fairly rash one, so maybe it is better they go their separate ways.

Yes.  They don’t even know for certain what the blocker will do, but hey, we gotta do *something*, so — let’s jump off the cliff together, each of us with equal agency, neither of us knowing where we’ll fall!

@tardigrade  So each of them seems to be able to soldier on, memory intact. So is it really essential for someone’s memory to go?

Yes, it is — *his* memory of *her*.  He’s not getting it, it’s too close.  But what I see is that the Doctor has been obsessed with Clara from the get-go; she, IMO, has never been obsessed with him (cherchez le Danny, for instance . . . ), although she became delightedly dependent on him for thrills and adventures to make her life feel worthwhile and significant, and happy for him to serve as a model of how to successfully cope with all those extraordinarily challenging adventures.  His addiction has been to her; hers has been to action and exploration, a hero’s life — with herself as a hero.  She knows she has it in her to be that: traveling in the TARDIS, she’s found out by experience.

So, sad as she is to part ways, she’s ready to strike out on her own taking nothing from her times with him but her memories.  He’s ready too, he says, even though she reminds him that he can’t make her safe.  But with his obsessive “duty of care” intact, how long before he’d feel compelled to find her and follow her, keeping close by, ready to leap in at any moment and help or rescue her at any cost, always hovering on the brink of getting back together and bang, they’re the hybrid peril again.  I see him becoming a fiercely obsessive, increasingly crazy, and dangerously powerful guardian angel — to someone who *doesn’t want one*.  What sane and strong young adult really wants that?  Some kids leave home to escape such suffocating hovering, and rightly so.

And he would be ignoring his wider duty of care — passing through, helping out, all over space and time.  IOW, he would cease to be the Doctor.  Really he already has, since he’s willing to bring space and time to ruin just to get her this far from a death that *must* finish happening anyway.

I just did my first re-watch of Hell Bent, and I have to say, much as I enjoy bonkerizing in such good company, I think Moffat didn’t lie when he said he’s not nearly as complicated a storyteller as people think.  I think he wrote it, and they played it, straight — no devious plans and loving but patronizing manipulations, just this pair’s normal free-wheeling improvisation as events continually blow their previous improv to hell so that they have to come up with another one, stat!  Until they turn to chance to make the final decision for them.

And it works; my, how it works — breath-taking, really.

@whisht  Let’s hear it for the CD of Rassilon!  That’s going to stay in *my* memory, or there will be hell to pay.

And I reserve the right, of course, to change my mind about everything.

ichi

 

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@jphamlore  Is it possible that Moffat has throughout the season been portraying the Doctor as a victim of PTSD

Interesting; it would be no surprise if the Doctor *were* subject to PTSD for a long succession of highly traumatic events, but some core elements seem not to apply (suicidal thoughts and impulses?  Flashbacks?  Uncontrollable outbursts of violence?).  Certainly not on a regular basis.  Of course it could be more easily moderated for a TL, but still — the major one, nervous agitation, seems fitting for Deep Breath.

Mind you, someone struggling with PTSD as a constant state is probably not what anyone wants for a “family viewing” show, where lightness and playfulness and a certain amount of wish fulfillment are part of the recipe (which is why the Doctor doesn’t return to Gallifrey and just blow the Citadel to kingdom come, instead of bloodlessly removing some jerks from high office and killing a soldier [also bloodlessly, and not before making sure he still has some regenerations to go] for demanding to shove Clara back in front of the Raven with a “Sorry my dear”.

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@mudlark  That all makes good sense, thanks.  The query aptly symbolizes my usual state of mind, so it’s fine.

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@mudlark   I think that the experience within the confession dial is that of a mind within a completely immersive virtual environment . . .  the wall of azbantium, rather than being the real, physical barrier it appeared to be, was a metaphor for an obstacle which could only be overcome by innumerable repeated attacks on it over several billion years.

Works for me — the wall is just as real as the 4 billion + years — only inside the VR immersion of the Dial, which also tells us how the Doctor comes out of it without a scratch on him.  But — there is one real thing in there with him: when the Veil steps outside after him, it collapses into empty cloth and cog-wheels.

Going off at a tangent, I’ve been meaning to say that I found Capaldi as the Doctor in icy, vengeful mode utterly, spine-tinglingly compelling, and though it may be reprehensible of me, I do enjoy it when we see the dark side of the Doctor.  

Me, too — very bracing, like a plunge in the cold North sea (look what this guy *could* be . . . !).

his consciousness was embedded within an avatar of himself in the simulation, so the experience felt completely real in every detail.

That’s very clear; thank you.  But it does raise the question — so where was he, his physical self, while all this was going on inside the Dial + his consciousness?  Disassembled in Trap Street and transported to Gallifrey, where the Dial ejects him to be reconstituted whole as he steps out onto the sand?  Never mind “hell of a bird” — that’s a hell of a gadget!  And nothing like any concept I know of a “Last Will and Testament”.

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@miapatrick   I meant he didn’t seem surprised when Missy and Clara turned up at his going out party.

Oh, right — for some reason I thought you meant that Missy and Clara turned up in the Confession Dial (well, Clara did . . . sort of).

he wasn’t expecting to be taken by force, was he?

Maybe not, but he *should* have been (I mean, Davros!  Even Davros dying . . . !).

@morpho  You’re welcome.  Your #49215 — very neat!  I’m still unable to get a mental grip on the matter of the Dial, though.

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@jphamlore  if you put on a soldier’s uniform, with the possible exception of someone who is a Gallifreyan foot soldier, the Doctor is almost going to go out of his way to make sure you die for your country for your sin. 

Oh, hardly; he didn’t blow up the plane or insist on a military patrol to go to the church.  But he seems to feel that if you sign off your killing capacity to the control of some higher military power, then you are also waiving your natural right to not be killed by somebody else.  The people in uniform sign on for risk and off for personal responsibility (“I was only following orders, Sir!”), so whatever happens to them is a matter of indifference to him.  He reserves his concern for those caught, against their will, in the crossfire.  Soldiers, being official agents of violence, can supposedly fend for themselves, while civilians can’t, so the latter command his attention.

The Doctor should have known something was wrong at the ending of Sleep No More because he hadn’t succeeded in killing off Nagata

He does know; he hustles them off to the TARDIS fretting aloud that he still doesn’t understand what the hell is going on, which is why they have to beat a retreat instead of outwitting the bad guys.  I think Clara should have noticed, and taken the warning that the Doctor can often help, but ultimately she needs to depend on herself.

@morpho  why does he think he’s going to die? He doesn’t enter the dial because he’s dying; he’s forced into it to be interrogated.

No, he doesn’t.  I think he foresees this increasingly dangerous course that he and Clara are dancing along together as a death spiral: one or the other of them will “show off” by taking a badly secured risk (as it happens, both, in the trap street, he by accepting Ashildr’s assurances, she by counting on his fix-anything skills), and then one or both of them will likely die in an attempted rescue because they can’t NOT try to rescue each other.  And it’s all about to be set off faster on this course, he suspects, because Davros is looking for him, and it’s not to invite him to a tea dance.  So the Confession Dial is a just-in-case measure.  We still have no idea what format it originally had, because Missy or Rassilon or both have turned it into a trap for him.

@miapatrick  he didn’t seem surprised to see either Missy or Clara there. And Clara turning up meant he had to win when he was otherwise resigned to losing.

Missy showed up in the Confession Dial?  I missed that; or you meant to write a different name?

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@jphamlore  Wow, that’s a great hunk of background — if I ever knew it, I’ve forgotten it completely, and that’s *without* a neural blocker, mind!  Well, what you’re describing seems to be the War Doctor.  CapDoc, in our time, has shown great distaste for soldiering and soldiers (despite having hung in there for quite a bit of it on WhatsitPlanet, as SmithDoc.  I think the War Doctor is exactly what he does *not* want to be again (this is the guy advocating mercy, which is not usually typical of a war zone), having gone so far as to once have blown his own planet to kingdom come and then suffered miles of guilt and horror for that after — *and* Clara’s reaction at the end of, say, MotOE, to what she takes to be his heartless efficiency has re-enforced that.  He’s just given a speech against war because of his own awful memories of doing terrible things when he was engulfed in that situation.

So yes, he’s certainly *capable* of atrocities; but he’s been trying, as they say, to put all that behind him (me, I’d rather keep it up front where I could keep an eye on it).  So I think that in his own eyes in a quieter time, having shot the general just for getting in his way (instead of doing a clever thing to get round him) would look like serious backsliding into exactly what he *doesn’t* want to be.  Because that way lies the Valeyard (a version of the fully corrupted and power-mad Rassilon, in a way).

So, not “unhinged” exactly; more like throwing all his weight on only one hinge of a three-hinged door, and it’s the one that when it fails would fail most spectacularly.  In the real world, these judgments do tend to hang on how you feel about the outcome, though, so . . . different viewpoints do make a difference.

 

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@puroandson  Dear Puro Solo, thanks for that, funny as hell — it is to laugh, or else to cry.  I guess we’ve all gotta eat, or at least cope with, the darker and more rotten fruit of the bright and empathic education reforms that grew out of the sixties (I’m thinking of the ideas of people like Jonathan Kozol (I think) here in the US, actually hardly had any effect except to make it easier for the Dolts of Rigidity to push out the harder necessities of real teaching).

I think Son of Puro will do just fine; after all, look at Mom of Puro!

You sound as if you’re feeling somewhat better; I hope so, and wish you both happy and relaxing holidays.

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@notime  I still can’t help but think the Doctor realized that Clara failed to reverse the polarity and in fact rendered the neural block useless so he decided to fake his memory wipe. It just seemed that way to me when I re-watched the episode. His mannerisms seem to show that he was working though the remaining moves in a game of chess and found a stalemate scenario each time. So he had to improvise

That could well be; although it would be even more painful, in some ways — but also *stronger*, since then he would have to move Clara out of his mental foreground and into the background by sheer will, in order to resume and stick to his Doctor role, coat and sonic and all.  I must look again!

@winston  Glad that helped.  With an ending as ambiguous as this one, we need all the help we can get.  Luckily, there’s no need to reach a consensus — only for civility, and we are rich in that here.

@puroandson   It would be nice to think they both remember but isn’t this supposed to be a tragedy for them both? If he recalls things then the tragedy part of gone and I can’t bear that.

That’s the beauty of how Moffat has done this: it’s ambiguous enough that you can decide on the interpretation that is most satisfying for *you*, and find evidence to support it!  Brilliant, I must say, and brilliantly acted besides.

 

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@puroandson  Dear Son of Puro — thank you!  I’m just glad it made sense — I was still a bit jet-lagged at the time from a trip last weekend.  The best way I know of to get a good vocabulary and a good command of ways to use them for different purposes is, first — to read.  Lots.  And I don’t mean, read what passes for words on Twitter et al.  I think part of the “stoopid” that thrashes itself about on some DW sites is due to lack of reading books, good books full of good stories.  One thing I’ve found among my colleagues is that almost all of them were read to by their parents when they were little.  Wish more people “had time” to do that now.  We’re getting a lot of stoopidifcation these days for the lack of it, IMO.  This is certainly a special site, with so many very articulate posters here!  I think knowing how to articulate ideas effectively helps us think more clearly and further into even complicated subjects.

People do hate anything that makes them feel stupid, though (Moffat’s Doctor Who stories, I think).  Tough, says I (although that’s not always the most constructive response . . . ).

Nothing wrong with watching an episode only twice — Some of us here are a little extreme with re-watches, maybe.  I like to space them out, and see what rises to the surface of my memory when I think back on it later.  That tends to be the important stuff (for me).  Then I can look at those parts more closely the next time around.

I’m very very glad that you convinced your mom to stay with us; thank you.

 

 

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@notime  I presume Clara must have been very moved to see the tribute left on the outside of the tardis. She no doubt would have known exactly who did it. I wonder if Ashildr looked on with envy since she would never know what it feels like to be memorialized.

Seeing the proof of Rigsy’s admiration for Clara could be very inspiring to Ashildr as Apprentice, who already has said she admired Clara.

And hi!  I’ve found discussions on this forum indispensable for getting to grips with what these shows have to offer, too.  Moffat has a *very* convoluted mind, I think, and that coupled with the need for a story that kids can get good stuff from too makes for pretty amazing richness, sometimes.  This is where I learned how very, very important re-watching is, when the material is so densely layered and scattered with hidden gems.

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@puroandson  What was great?  Do you mean the quote (which I forgot to put quotation marks around) in #49171, from another discussion board?  If so, thanks very much — I put that on that board myself, in response to an unhappy post by someone there that set off some explosions in my brain, which is I guess “where I got it from” in the first place.  Something in that person’s post made me remember that what the Doctor said in passing out was *not* “Never cruel, never cowardly; never give up, never give in”, but the crucial emendation, “make amends”.  Brain blew up, poured brain soup out through chattering fingers on the keyboard.  And you know what?  I feel so much better now!  I mean, I’m still busted up by the conclusion, but now the satisfaction level is about 400 times higher for me (mind you, that just happens to be where I am these days, where this could speak to me — or where I could see this pattern in the story for my own reasons).  Mileage, as always varies with the individual . . .

The place is the whole discussion of “Hell Bent”, at

http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/12-great-moments-from-hell-bent-part-2-78875.htm?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf_comment=426439573

Amazing fireworks have been going on over there — people just flashing great perceptions at each other and off each other’s posts, thick and fast and spectacular — never seen anything like it in that location, but I do often check in there because most of the whinging and snarling has abated significantly lately.

 

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A bit more on “making amends” (my post #49171, above) (this just won’t leave me alone).  I thought that at the end of S8, the Doctor was ready to go out and attend to those “many mistakes” he spoke of in Deep Breath; now I think I was very wrong about that.  He still had to get past something first: his obsession with Clara, a total distraction into which he plunged head first with little thought for anything else (“What’s his catch phrase?” fans said; “‘Clara!'”).  He found a true soulmate, the Impossible Girl and the more real and more difficult young woman she became in S8), a personal lodestar in a troubled time, and he couldn’t tear himself away.

He couldn’t help but realize that it was all going to end in tears, floods of ’em, in S9, and more or less said so, warning her, drawing attention to how a human isn’t armed to take on the perils a TL might choose to rush into (“showing off” as he puts it himself).  But he still can’t tear himself away — that is, do something about it.  It’s too rewarding for him (and for her, and he wants to see her happy), too exhilarating.  He indulges himself, and her, because he can’t help it.

And then they hit a terrific skid of bad luck, death for her and massive (largely self-inflicted) anguish for himself, that drives him to break his own rules, a betrayal of what he says he stands for (although “never give up, never give in” worked pretty well for him inside the Confession Dial) that he does not recognize until it’s pointed out to him by Ohila and Clara — the quick young woman, and the wise older one.  Ohila calls him “boy” in a scathing tone, because she sees so clearly how he’s regressed to the rules of childhood: “I WANT, and if I can’t HAVE I will trash this place” — see “I’m barely getting started”).

So this is a growth spurt, right in front of our eyes, and it’s a doozie.  Recalled to himself and his ideals, he returns to himself by expelling the cherished soulmate (who is now ready to go, her apprenticeship done) from his own mind through the stratagem with the neural blocker.  He explains to her what he’s just done and why in the most tightly compressed message of mature social morality I’ve ever seen*, and later returns for a last look at the results of his handiwork: Clara, free and clear and on her way.

Time then to step into the next phase of his life — as an adult, his mad Rumpspringe (as it were) behind him, and his strength and intelligence marshaled for what comes next.  Maybe attending to some of those old “mistakes”, now that he’s grown up and clear headed enough to do it right.  In S10.

*He *could* have said, instead of “never give up, never give in”, “and mercy, always mercy.”  But he knows better now.  You can’t always live up to your ideals, and you need a fall back position for those times when, for whatever reason, you fail to be kind, brave, and determined.  You need to figure out how to make amends, and then go do it and forgive yourself and move on.  And he’s not trying to *teach* that to Clara, advise her, instruct her — he’s not her teacher any more, and she’s not his.  He’s just telling her what *he* is doing with this mind wipe thing, because “People like us [complicated people with complicated inner lives] — we need to *say* things to each other.”  Maybe the last lesson he’s learned from her, since you can’t go on learning from what you’ve forgotten.

I’m sorry if I’ve been repetitious and burbly about this — I’m just still just bowled over by the scope and depth of what I think they did here, and how long Moffat’s long game has really been . . .

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I just posted this over on Doctor Who TV, and thought I’d bring it here too — if it’s repeating stuff others have already posted here, apologies, since I have no time to catch up on the latest right now —

But really, I am an idiot.

@Rainbow Kidneys loves “Sleep No More” Good grief. You’re right about the basic problem. I just put something together for myself, thanks to some of the comments I’ve read here, so much thanks for the explosion of creative thinking going on here over the ending.

I didn’t retain it that the Doctor shoots the General *because the general said he wouldn’t allow Clara to leave the room*. Rainbow Kidneys, below is quite right: that was a cruel and cowardly act — to shoot the unarmed and repentant ally because he was acting as an obstacle to the rescue of Clara, not “for no reason.” But the Doctor in his right mind would use his real weapons — words. Not execution. Not murder. Meantime he just throws Rassilon, the actual leader of the cabal off “his planet”, tossed away like garbage.

Clara is horrified by what he just did; Ohila tells him he’s betrayed his principles and does so with great conviction and disgust; and he himself admits he’s “gone too far”.

Then the neural blocker works against him instead of Clara as “the luck of the draw”, and as he passes out from it, he says to her (from memory, no time to re-watch), “Never cruel or cowardly; if you are, always make amends.”

He doesn’t need to tell her not to be cruel or cowardly; she’s learned that, and he knows it. The important part is *making amends* — that HE make amends. *That’s* what’s so important to tell her! My rough translation: “Forgive me for this — *I’ve* been cruel and cowardly, and failed you and so many others. This is the way I’ve found to make amends for all of it — giving up every last vestige of you.”

Ohila’s presence is not a casual inclusion just for the hell of it; she’s acting as a true friend, whether he likes it or not. She’s there to point to out to him and condemn his crimes of excess, his Doctor Victorious moments, his War Doctor actions. He needs to hear her, and hear Clara — and figure out what he needs to do to show that he accepts this judgment, and not just by saying sorry.

How much of any of this he actually does remember in the closing diner scene is debatable, of course. But the enormity of the gesture — finally, he put his own principles ahead of his obsession with Clara and instead of running, paid his true penance, which *isn’t* about smashing down a diamond wall with his bare hands after all. That was self-punishment. This is realizing how far he’s let his obsession drive him from his own rules, and doing something — a real something, a big something — about it.  And letting Clara know that’s what he’s doing.

Because “people like us — we should *say* things to each other . . . ”

Now I have to go — I have some amends of my own to make this morning.

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@bluesqueakpip  Missy is about to spend 936 years in a sodding sewer. 😉

Fingers crossed . . . she’s certainly stuck somewhere, since she doesn’t appear to be on Gallifrey where if she could, she would surely be, to see how the Confession Dial event plays out.

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@mersey  And the Zygon Inversion is not the answer for my fear, grief, anger or helplessness. So I think I was correct in my opinion about this episode. It LOOKS TO ME shallow, naive or silly. But thankfully my opinion is not a rule and it can change.

Thinking about your post, above, for which my thanks.  The conversation here does tend toward the emergence of a sort of rough consensus about the flow of plot and character in any given episode, usually with dissent pretty amiably accepted (unless it’s obvious trolling and stirring for its own sake).  Moreover, I think that people welcome viewpoints informed by life-experiences not commonly reflected here, for whatever reasons.  It’s also good to be reminded of the limits of the show we love (they are many) and where it flies in the face of someone’s lived reality.  I believe it takes some friction, someplace back down the line, to make light . . . ?

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@spud  You’re fine, don’t sweat it.  Maybe a Big Finish audio series for Clara and Ashyldr — that would be neat, and much easier to schedule around these actors’ screen work.  Here’s hoping!

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@lisa — Thanks so much for that!

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@notime You’re welcome!

@pedant  All of the times I thought the Doctor knew something, those sideways furrowed-brow glances (leading to the whole “Are the episodes in the right order?” debate) can now be more easily and more realistically interpreted as becoming increasingly concerned: the difference between “bad luck” and “an accident waiting to happen”.
That’s what drove the Doctor on his 4.5 billion year quest – rage at having having seen it coming, but having done nothing. Self-disgust, if you like. And the price he paid for that was forgetting.  Utterly brilliant storytelling.

Thanks; I’ve been wrestling with that one, myself.  And rage at his failure at exercising his duty of care (let alone love) does make sense of the mystifying secret/non-secret that he’s so desperate to keep.  I agree with you too on Missy and Rassilon as co-conspirators: I could see it in the abstract, but it didn’t *really* work for me.

@jphamlore  I think Moffat is going to gift the next showrunner the freedom to take Doctor Who in any direction by Moffat’s writing the last classic series storyline, given closure just as he gave the story of Clara Oswald closure in Hell Bent. . . . imagine a final battle where the Matrix achieves its godhood creating a new universe and where the Doctor is freed of all of his past questions. Everything is now possible for the next showrunner.

I like your reminder of how much more Clara knows than Ashildr does, at this point, about dealing with time TL style.  And I like your big thinking in post 49075 — but maybe it’s too big for the reality-situation?  An AI that creates its own new universe leans pretty hard toward ideas of God and religion, and while SF and fantasy fans have no problems, generally, about such things, the BBC Broadcast Lords might very well balk at this in a “family viewing” show.

Although judging by some of what’s gotten through in S8 and S9 . . . maybe not.

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@mudlark  The inner eye of memory is no longer capable of *seeing* her there, nor can he recall how it felt to be in her company; and crucially as @arbutus and @tardigrade observed, the emotional connection which bound them together so tightly has gone.

@bluesqueakpip  After all, if the idea is to protect Clara from ever being traced through the Doctor, it has to be impossible for him to even recognise her or ever work out who she is.

Deep Breath, Doctor: You look at me, and you don’t see me.  Please.  Just *see* me.

Last Xmas, Doctor: Clara Oswald, you will always look the same to me.

TMA, Doctor: When do I *not* see you?

If you guys are right, that question has been answered: ever again.

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@ozitenor  right after she realized the Doctor suffered for billions of years for no reason other than to save her. She says “People like me and you, we should say things to one another, and I am going to say them now”. I wonder if it was just something simple and sentimental, an expression of gratitude and love. Anybody have any insights?

I think you’ve got it: simple and forthright.  The things she stopped him from trying to say, just before she stepped outside to face the Raven, because there was no time and because she was afraid that if he spoke then her resolve to do so would melt away.  There’s hardly any time there in the cloister basement, but she demands to get these things said anyway, this time with herself as the first speaker.  Melting resolve is a surmountable problem for him, as we’ve seen in the Confession Dial, and he’s “spoken” his feelings already, by what he chose to do there.

She’ll answer in words, but the words are for him and for herself, not for us.  I think this is an artistic choice that Moffat has made before — to draw back and give his characters the private moments that actual people sometimes need and deserve to have.  He knows when to butt out, that man, and leave our imaginations to bridge the gap — a writer exercising his “authority” (in the fullest sense) over his material, his creations, and his audience.  I can only admire.

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@arbutus  Did anyone notice that the Doctor, on being ordered to “lay down your weapons”, dropped his spoon to the table?

Yes!  Loved it, and a call back to what he’s come to get paid for by the instigators of the Dial ordeal: eating soup in the castle, asking himself if he’ll have to stay there . . . forever?  And the spoon slips out of his hand.

“Well, we finally got our dark Doctor.” We never really saw the War Doctor at work . . . It was interesting to me that during their brief exchange, the general, on hearing the Doctor barking out the question, “Regeneration?”, seemed more resigned than anything. He replied with equal brevity, “Tenth.” And they wished each other luck before the Doctor shot him. Very interesting dynamic.

To say the least . . . definitely warrior to warrior: “You lose, you pay — try and do better next time.”  Whereas Rassilon is hustled off in his old body.  I wish the Doctor had wiped the Confession Dial and sent that with the old bastard.

when Clara asks how long the Doctor was in the confession dial, “We think four and a half billion years,” strongly suggesting that the time inside the dial was indeed subjective.

I’m taking that as confirmation; no other answer makes any sense to me.  Which reminds me — he reads Clara’s writing, he does as he is told without comment or delay, soberly, as with founding a ritual.  If he truly does *not* remember Clara, how come there’s no surprise, no puzzlement about these messages?  He must know whose instructions those are (those of a very good teacher), and that nothing’s left but this brief coda of simple, silent obedience, for the last time.

I agree that the final bit was perfect (and you know how skeptical I am about the whole concept of perfection . . . ).

@tardigrade  it’s the emotional connection that was the more important thing that’s been weakened by the wipe, more than the actual memories of what happened, which do seem to be there, even if not in their original form, so even if he does fill in the gaps over time, it seems he’ll be able to live with those memories now.

Works for me.  It’s the Clara-as-his-conscience that’s gone, along with that deep-rooted and unshakable bond he had with her because of the Impossible Girl experience.  If Clara has graduated into autonomous adulthood well prepared to lead her own life of space adventure, the Doctor has also graduated, from the School of Clara, presumably with not her voice but what he learned from his time with her (like, the addictive joys and the inevitable dangers of being obsessed with or dependent on anyone, or even losing yourself in the intricacies of your own mind) firmly integrated into his brain.  She doesn’t need a protector any more and he doesn’t need a teacher of ethics and emotional balance.

Also @notime, that little sequence is pretty explicit as to who the waitress was, and if he hadn’t realized until the diner tardised away, surely he would have reacted strongly to suddenly *realizing* who it was.  No; I think he must have known going in.  So — is it a sad and final echo of the goodbye cafe scene at the end of DiH, with both pretending, but this time it’s a parting of his devising?  The closing stage of his duty of care, which was a thrashing mess much of the time, but which concluded with success: release for both of them.

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@bluesqueakpip   Oh, and — Yes, the fatal flaw is more his than hers, as he recognizes when he talks to the chalk board:  Doctor: “What would (Clara) do?”

Board/Clara: “The same as you.”

Doctor: “Of course; that’s what got you killed.”

Rory’s judgment is validated: the Doctor, fooling about saving people and showing off, brought out the latent hero in his companion, and she died because of accidental blow-back from acting like a TL when you’re a human with just one life.  Yet he’s bad at traveling alone, so — what does he need by way of companionship next time?  A sidekick?

Let’s note, though, that in one way Clara’s trust in the Doctor was not misplaced: whatever else happened, she *did* in fact gain the opportunity for a Doctor way of life, albeit on human terms, because he would not give up exercising his duty of care, even past her actual death.  Her ambitions to become A Doctor led her through the fire, but in the end has been rewarded, not punished.  Icarus falls, and then soars again.

 

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@bluesqueakpip  As devious plots by Missy go, she couldn’t have been more honest and less devious about it. She flat-out told him what she was doing in Death in Heaven, and then gave him a further massive hint in The Witch’s Familiar. And it’s also a very ‘hybrid’ plot: Clara is the enemy inside the friend and Missy, who sent her, is the friend inside the enemy.

Missy is that, isn’t she?  Interesting, how that worked.  Her purpose was fairly simple: to make huge trouble for him, driving him away from his involvement with humans and bring him to his oldest friend for help.  Only her plans are always wacky even when they work (part way at least).  Everything she does is too narrowly conceived because her egomania blinds her to the impact of others’s actions and perceptions on events, so it inevitably goes awry, or overshoots the mark and turns into something else.

So what she actually served the Doctor (through Clara’s company) was a look at madness and obsession from *the inside*.  In S8, it’s the stormy and terrifying mid-life crisis that brings him clarity about his regenerated self.  In S9 he lives through the *opposite* of deep and desolate loneliness: traveling with his soul-mate as companion.  It’s the flirty romance of SmithDoc pushed to an extreme of closeness.  We find that the such a depth of connection and caring can so fully occupy and distort your life that you *must* turn away to survive (and to preserve the autonomous life of your cherished one).

Which I doubt was Missy’s intention at all.  She’s a natural agent of chaos, which means that sometimes her worst actions lead to more good than bad results, because, well, *chaos*.  All bets are off.  And the beneficiaries of Missy’s campaign to nab the Doctor for herself are many, but I don’t see Missy herself as one of them.  He’s not going looking for her to tell her she was right and invite her aboard.  He’s sallying forth in his beautiful wine-colored coat to be the hero with the healing touch that he’s meant to be.

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