Did Hell Bent damage The Doctor's character?

Agreed. I mean, he shot the General. He. Shot. The. General. In cold blood. For no reason than to save someone that he broke every rule to save and should have stayed dead. That's not The Doctor. No matter how many regenerations the General had. I guess he really is the criminal they always thought he was. So the High Council was right about him, and we were all wrong.

I'll go even farther. I also think it damaged Gallifrey, especially for those who have only ever watched the new series. The farmers were confusing. How are the different from humans? And Rasillon was just a useless old man. Was THIS the people and the planet that he has felt so guilty about over his last 4 regenerations?

Yeah, I think he was damaged but was on the way back to normal by the end of the episode. I don't think Clara should have returned: the Doctor being broken by his torture and trying to get Gallifrey restored to its former glory would have been enough for me. Being home, getting over Clara's death and billions of years of torture and then slowly realising that having Gallifrey back wasn't as great as he thought it was would have been a great story.

Ooh, now there's an idea... The Doctor tosses out Rassilon and starts his own I, Claudius styled takeover in his place.

Oh, I found that absolutely unconscionable. You have at least a dozen stories to choose from and the one he seemed to draw the most from was Arc of Infinity. Gallifrey was built up as this incredible world and to have it suddenly turn out be just another bog standard planet of the week strikes me as nothing short of missing the point entirely. I hated the idea of bringing back Gallifrey (and Hell Bent confirmed my suspicions), but to my mind the place looked more like Skaro now than anywhere else.

Shrouded in perpetual night due to the amount of debris in the ionosphere, the planet's surface is a roiling cancerous mass of broken histories which flow out on the time winds and in eddies like clouds of radiation. Those not fortunate enough to reach the Capitol in time were fused with their high collars, transmuted into hideous, deformed abominations that whisper of times long past that never were. The sky is now a bruised purple from the blue/red shift of the time vortex, the leaves on the mutated trees a dull, rusty gold. The beautiful elite sit in the central column of the Capitol, trying to construct a new life for themselves out of what little technology remains. There's intimations that the Gallifreyans may not even have enough resources for time travel anymore, they may just have to become a spacefaring race again. Their children are monsters, die or are never born and the city has split between the High Council that seeks to consolidate its power, the CIA that wishes to annexe other worlds for their resources (essentially turning Gallifrey into an empire) left and another subversive power that advocates peaceful exploration of Kasterborous -- a secret order devoted to Gallifrey's renegades.

That would have been way more interesting than just simply bringing Clara back for an ultimately unnecessary final appearance.

Why not combine both? Give Gallifrey a bit of mystery by having the Doctor actually running things off-screen, but have his adventures basically be him slipping away from his responsibilities to just have fun like he always did. His urgency not to stay for one place too long could be because he's worried about being caught out.

No it didn't.

Sorry but the more time passes the more I find I'm enjoying Capaldi's take on the Doctor " I did/do some horrible stuff sometimes I regret it, but in the long run it helps and is right." I also find the reality check from ME highly patronising. She's not completely wrong but the smug delivery really annoys me, plus the ending nullifies the events anyway.

Regards

mark687

Nope. It's in the same way that The Water of Mars didn't. We all have a dark side and Hell Bent was the 12th Doctor's Time Lord Victorious.

I guess his shooting of the General does kind of give more weight to the idea he'll do anything to save his friends, but he's always stopped short of actually doing it. As Clara points out two episodes before his 'reign of terror would end at the sight of the first crying child', so his pulling of the trigger is jarring to me, even though he knows the General will survive.

If I'm honest I liked Hell Bent till Clara was brought back. It's not because I hated the character but I felt Face the Raven had given her a fitting ending, and Heaven Sent had explored grief so well it felt untouchable. Well so much for that. And now we have her as basically immortal, though Moffat tries the caveat of 'but she'll still die someday', yes someday but it might be thousands of years later so she could travel as long as the Doctor has. Classic trying to have cake of emotional departure and eat it with happy ending.

I kind of think it fulfilled Moffat's take on the character from The Eleventh Hour. By the time he escaped his 10 million torture he was a madman in a blue box and he acted as such. I guess I kind of understand The Doctor's action in light him not being able to save Amy & Rory. The weakness of the show these past two, really 3 seasons, is Clara. I don't know that Moffat ever really knew what he wanted Clara to be, except, of course, a companion who wanted to be The Doctor. The Impossible Girl, The Modern Woman or the Thrill Junkie. I was never really sold on any of them, although the Thrill Junkie was the most interesting of the three takes on her. Still, to answer the question posed...yeah. Maybe. A little. After 50+ years the show always need to be pushing itself in slightly different directions, it is after all a show built on change & renewal, while still keeping it's core in tact. The Clara memory wipe did kind of reset the 12th Doctor. I'm curious to see how series 10 spins out from that. I will say the addition of Nardole as The Doctor's valet/caregiver or maybe his Alfred Pennyworth, is a really interesting development for me.

That's another sore point. There is absolutely no reason why he couldn't just visit them in a few years. It's just "the 1930s" that he supposedly cannot now visit. (Unless he goes back and finishes the device he was working on at the beginning of last year's Christmas special)

All that has to happen is making sure that the book they were following in The Angels Take Manhattan gets written and published.






(Granted, a similar point could be made about Adric. They see the ship blow up from the TARDIS scanner, but they do not have an active sound like or anything like that with Adric at the time. There really is no reason he couldn't program in a lightning-quick materialization around Adric and then dematerialization, just before the thing explodes.)