Why “Hell Bent” is not the best Doctor Who episode Steven Moffat wrote.

I love Hell Bent. It’s an episode of new Doctor Who I often find myself going back to when I want the heart strings tugged on, or when I want to see the Doctor & Clara pushed to the limits – Time Lord Victorious style. Confessionally, that desire is frequent. And I think – I think – I would love it even if I wasn’t a Moffat disciple.

Having Clara right there in front of the Doctor’s face the whole time while he’s trying to remember who Clara is? Oh, so beautiful.

I got to thinkin’ about Hell Bent when I saw Alex Moreland repost his Yahoo! Movies article Why ‘Hell Bent’ is Steven Moffat’s best episode of Doctor Who into the Doctor Who fans who actually like the show Facebook Group. It’s a good piece with compelling points, especially about how Hell Bent is probably being the best companion exit episode in New Who.

“…something difficult to achieve for a character that had already left several times, but something Moffat pulled off with panache regardless.”

Alex Moreland

It’s especially funny considering in the RTD era, the Doctor never really said a definitive “Goodbye,” to a companion till they all left together in Season 4.

“What about Rose? The Doctor burned up a sun just to stay ‘Goodbye’ to Rose.”

The Tennant Fandom

For starters, the chickenshit never told Rose how he felt before the sun burned up and the transmission cut, but he did say she was on the list of the dead back home.

“Quite right, too.”

Tenth Doctor. Doomsday. Season 2. Episode 13.

Additionally, you’re going to tell me you weren’t looking in every nook & cranny of every scene in Season 4, rewinding & pausing to see if she’d pop up on a display screen or reflection in the glass or newspaper article after you saw her screaming for the Doctor in the first episode of the season 4? I was.

Rose was literally & figuratively the Bald Wolf who haunted the Tenth Doctor in Seasons 3 & 4, much like the crack was to Season 5.

So, “yes”. I agree Hell Bent is probably the best companion exit story.

But for it being Steven Moffat’s best Doctor Who-penned piece…

Three Reasons why Hell Bent isn’t Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who “best” episode, despite how good it was.

1. Heaven Sent was the better part of the “two-parter”.
2. Hell Bent nerfed Rassilon, then The General, all in about 5 minutes.
3. So Many Incredible Episodes | “Best” Steven Moffat Doctor Who Stories

Heaven Sent was the better half of the semi two-parter.

Heaven Sent is a Moffat master class in creative storytelling. The story is a haunting set in the inner workings of a pocket watch, what a Time Lord confession dial seemingly resembles. Moffat slowly speeds up those delicate inner-workings till they precisely snap at the crescendo, a concept that is easy to picture and manically difficult to recreate.

We start with a remorseful ghost story. The Doctor is trapped in a gothic castle, constantly reminded of the death of Clara by her fireplace portrait. While he worked through the castle, picking up clues, the Doctor realized he is being hunted for his knowledge of the Hybrid. The Doctor successfully navigated his way to the exit only to discover it is blocked by a wall of Azbantium, a Gallifreyan mineral which is to diamond what diamond is to coal. And on the other side?

“The TARDIS. One confession away.”

The Doctor. HEavent Sent. Season 9. Episode 11.

The Time Lords forced the Doctor into a choice: Give into the inevitable and tell them what he knew of The Hybrid, or face the impossible. The Doctor being the Doctor, he chose the latter and punched away at the wall, reciting The Grimm Brothers’ The Shepherd’s Boy to pass the time until he’s killed again & and again over the course of what turns out to be 4 and a half billion years condensed into a moment.

The King said, “The third question is, how many seconds of time are there in eternity.” Then said the shepherd boy, “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”

Brothers Grimm. “The Shepherd Boy.”

Moffat culminated the 45-record called Heaven Sent into a frenetic, breathtaking climax, one Motown moment before everything sounded like The Chipmunks. Plumb brilliant.

In all, Heaven Sent was the perfect opus to the Doctor’s duty of care for Clara Oswald, and of his excruciating pain of failure.

Then, there’s Hell Bent.

For all its cathartic wrath and splendor, the part B-ish is not without head-scratching moments.

Hell Bent nerfed Rassilon, then the General, all in about 5 minutes.

When the episodes are this good, and we’re comparing the cream of the Moffat crop, then the differences are found in the details.

If there’s a secular deity of the Time Lords, it’s Rassilon, the Time Lord co-creator.

This means, if Rassilon does not co-create the Time Lords, there are no Time Lords. That means there is no Doctor (pre-Timeless Child possibility notwithstanding).

Inhale. Exhale. Breathe. It’s alright. Focus on your hearts-beat. We still have the Doctor. I promise. I know. That was scary, but it’s all right now.

But we’re talking about the bigger-than-big, larger-than-lives presence that sits atop the lore of Doctor Who, helping to hold the story’s mythos in perspective alongside fellow Time Lord creators Omega, and the in & out legend of The Other of the Cartmel Masterplan.

Rassilon is so big that the mere mention of his name in The Five Doctors gave credence to the otherwise cobbled-together 20^th Anniversary special and placed all (4) 5 Doctors and Lord President Borusa in their respective rank & file.

In short: It doesn’t bigger than Rassilon.

Saying the Doctor – one season removed from admitting he’s an idiot – can take out Time Lord creator Rassilon with well-placed sonic Ray Ban messaging and a documented legacy of personal sacrifices in The Last Great Time War – as legendary as those acts were – against Rassilon, who was resurrected from the fuckin’ dead by The Time Lord War Council to lead Gallifrey in The Last Great Time War, is a bit over-the-top. It’s a bit surprisingly that a waft of The Doctor’s hair and a click of the sunglasses was all The General needed to lead a spontaneous revolution, instantly abdicating almighty deity Rassilon of his throne and kicking him off Gallifrey.

Yikes.

That’s a nerf that went through the washer & dryer and is now shedding on the laundry room floor.

Hell, even in the Tenth Doctor’s final episode, The End of Time, it took the Master’s rage-induced self-sacrifice and some serious temporal high ground to keep a resurrected Rassilon from easily taking over the earth.

Now, one could argue that a resurrected Rassilon, which is who appeared in Hell Bent, doesn’t have the power of his initial incarnation, and that could hold merit, but such a situation in and of itself should still be quite a grand master chess match of a story instead of the glorified cold open tidbit which aired in the episode.

“But it was Rassilon who put the Doctor in the confession dial…”

Yeah. And the Doctor should be pissed. 4 & a half billion years of running through a castle to bash an Azbantium wall with your fist before suffocating to death over and over and repeatedly would do that to anyone. But it didn’t make the Doctor a Time Lord creator the level of Rassilon. It just made him old.

Everybody knows that:

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don’t nerf Rassilon

Jim Croce. “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim.”

Clara: You said memories become stories when we forget them. Maybe some of them become songs.
The Doctor: That’d be nice.
Clara: Yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it?
{Clara leaves in the white TARDIS}

Hell Bent. Season 9. Episode 12.

Then, Not Five Minutes Later…

…after the instant abdication of the Father of all Time Lords, thanks in part to the help of the General, the Doctor couldn’t generate enough residual trust & goodwill from the revolutionary partnership for one more minute?

Was it because The Doctor didn’t sonic the plan to The General?

“It’s not like I’m fighting a fixed moment in time and resurrecting a dead Time Lord creator here, am I? I’m just stopping short of one.”

Headcannon

Maybe his hair didn’t waft enough at the control panel.

To me, this is just Moffat running out of time…

…stretched thin between running & writing Doctor Who and Sherlock deadlines. If the rumors are true, he was essentially re-writing most of the Doctor Who scripts coming in. Damn, that’s a bit of work.

Once again, paraphrasing Seneca:

So many stories, so little time.

So Many Incredible Episodes | “Best” Steven Moffat Doctor Who Stories

Once again, I love Hell Bent, but I couldn’t call it the best based on the above bits alone.

Now, assuming one could definitively prove that the once-in-a-generation story called Heaven Sent wasn’t adequate enough to ward off the testing of the Doctor’s Time Lord Victorious limits in Hell Bent – logic flaws in all – one would still have to stack Hell Bent up to Moffat’s other appraised stories. It’s a Hellluva a list. No sci-fi or TV site has the same top ten, twenty, thirty, or 40 list of Steven Moffat-penned Doctor Who stories, but to give a gist, let’s throw these out here, in order of appearance, to job your memory:

Season 1

• The Empty Child
• The Doctor Dances

Season 2

• The Girl in the Fireplace

Season 3

• Blink

Season 4

• Silence in the Library
• Forest of the Dead
• Time Crash

Incredible Characters whose mere mentions conjures instant joy:

• Captain Jack Harkness
• Madame de Pompadour
• Sally Sparrow
• River Song

Villains & Monsters who give us sweet repose from recycled Daleks & Cyberman and who earn repeat trips in New Who & Big Finish:

• Clockwork Androids
• The Weeping Angels
• Vashta Nerada

And quotes we instantly recall:

“Are you my mommy?”

The Empty Child. Season 1. Episode 9

“You want moves, Rose? I’ll give you moves. Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once! Everybody lives!”

The Doctor Dances. Season 1. Episode 10.

Rose: No, you’re not keeping the horse.
The Doctor: I let you keep Mickey.

GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE. SEASON 2. EPISODE 4.

Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.

Girl in the Fireplace. Season 2. Episode 4.

The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but, actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.

Blink. Doctor Who, Season 3 Episode 10

River Song: Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call…

… everybody lives.

Forest of the Dead. Doctor Who, Season 4, Episode 9.

Fifth Doctor: To days to come.
Tenth Doctor: All my love to long ago.

Time Crash

This is before he took over as Exec Producer / Show Runner starting Season 5.

Then, Steven Moffat created:

• 11^th Doctor
• Amy & Rory
• “Come along, Pond.” (Technically, Matt Smith came up with that on the first day of testing with Karen Gillan, so I’ve heard)
• The Roman
• The crack in the wall
• The Pandorica
• Flying Fish
• Melody Pond
• Clara
• The Impossible Girl
• The Silence
• The War Doctor
• The Day of the Doctor
• The Order of the Headless Monks
• The 12 Doctor
• The One Word Test
• Missy
• The Paternoster Gang
• Amelia Williams’ novels
• Listen
• Billy
• Nardole
• Me
• The War Doctor
• Cup of Soup
• The Great Curator

And those are just the things I’m riffing on as I realize the latest Star Trek Discovery episode dropped 27 minutes ago.

Talk about bashing a wall of Azbantium.

Moffat is all over Doctor Who, with adored episodes a’plenty.

Here are some websites that qualitatively come up with quantitative top 10 lists of Steven Moffat-written Doctor Who episodes. Heaven Sent is typically always above Hell Bent, assuming latter makes the list. Blink is most always #1, with Listen and The Day of the Doctor and others mentioned above.

• Syfy.com
• ComicBook.com
• Wired.co.uk
• ScreenRant.com

I don’t know how anyone comes up with such a list for reasons other than traffic bait. I can see how an episode cannot be the best, but I don’t know how one can be the best. Even Blink.

All Doctor Who all incredible for different reasons. Even the bad ones. They’re like Chicago pizza in that way – even if it’s cold or stale, it’s still Doctor Who. That’s typically better than anything else.

Summation.

Keeping to scope, I think the logic issues, the grace of A-part Heaven Sent, and the less-flawed competition of other great Steven Moffat-penned Doctor Who classics are more than enough elements to dispel the belief that Hell Bent is Moffat’s crowning achievement in Doctor Who. In the same breath, I can see why Hell Bent would have support for such a title. Everyone’s got a favorite.

Tastes and palettes and such.

Image Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons

Last updated by Finn at December 10, 2020.