Boy did fans have things to say when this was over. Admittedly there was no way the follow up to Heaven Sent could live up to its predecessor, but I think we can all agree it still could’ve been a lot better. Before Chris Chibnall and his run of terrible finales, including The Timeless Children which fans are still feeling raw about over five years later, we had Steven Moffat returning the Doctor to Gallifrey, something that Modern Who fans had been waiting for since the very beginning, and what we got was about twenty minutes of meandering with the Doctor hanging out in the barn Moffat seemed to love revisiting and reminding us of just how far the Time Lords had fallen since The War Games. We get a somehow lamer depiction of Rassilon than The End of Time, the Doctor waltzes in and takes over as ruler of Gallifrey while everyone keeps ominously mentioning this “Hybrid” creature we’re all supposed to be afraid of for whatever reason, and then Moffat decides to completely circumvent the death of Clara, at which point we ditch Gallifrey entirely and reveal the whole hybrid deal was complete horsesh*t while giving us a much weaker departure for Clara where the Doctor’s memory is wiped and she’s free to travel forever.

If you forgot your first time seeing this or weren’t around, this was looked at as one of Doctor Who’s major rage quitting finales. The wasted return to Gallifrey, doubling down on how pathetic the Time Lords are, rewriting the death of an unpopular companion, constantly teasing us with the series story arc only for it to amount to nothing and giving us yet another “Everybody lives!” resolution. It was the episode where people finally lost their patience with Moffat and were calling for him to leave, in tandem with Heaven Sent it’s like getting the best and worst of Moffat. Heaven Sent being Moffat the inventive writer we all fell in love with during RTD’s era, and Hell Bent being Moffat the showrunner with endless fan service, continuity references no one cares about, disappointing endings and being in love with his own vision of how Doctor Who should be. It’s honestly poetic, especially given the titles of the two episodes.

Coming back to Hell Bent almost ten years later, I will admit I’m not as filled with anger towards it now as I was back then. Yes it is definitely the weakest of the three episodes making up the Series 9 finale and no it’s not a good ending and Moffat really should’ve done a lot better than this (ya know, like one episode earlier!). But like any wounds, time does heal what this story left behind gradually, for one thing it’s considerably better than the finales we were in for later down the line. The Time Lords being an absolute joke is par for the course with Doctor Who to the point where there’s just no point expecting anything else. I’m probably in the minority, but I’m not missing them after being killed off by the Master in Series 12, I’m sure someday they’ll find a way back and be just as useless all over again, but honestly getting nuked offscreen by the Master I consider that a mercy killing! Retconning Clara’s death really should’ve been obvious going in as Modern Who is a show that’s cried “Bad Wolf” way too many times when it comes to killing off companions, and honestly even Classic Who doesn’t get a free pass considering they did almost the exact same thing with Peri.

The whole hybrid deal is indefensible, it’s like a parody of how a Modern Who series story arc plays out, easily the worst of the show, and yes I do utterly hate the Timeless Child story arc (the reveal of it being the Doctor not the actual concept itself), but at least we actually got something from it!!! All we get is Moffat not really understanding what a hybrid is supposed to be…

“What if the hybrid isn’t one person but two”

Because that’s not a hybrid! It’s two separate things!!! This is the same logic as calling two horses a single horse with two heads and two bodies!!! Funnily enough, The Timeless Children actually did a better job with this story arc if you think about it, in that episode Gallifrey’s a ruin, the Time Lords are all dead and the ones left standing in its ruins are the Master who’s a Time Lord merged with the Cyberium and the Cybermen who’ve now converted Time Lords. So there we are! Chibnall writes one of the worst finales in the show’s history and he inadvertently fixes the worst story arc in the show’s history! Go figure.

Amidst all its faults though, Hell Bent is still well produced and well performed, it really is the markings of how great the cast is that they act this material to the best of their abilities and almost make it work. The ending being a flip of the coin between either the Doctor or the companion losing their memory, a weirdly common trope throughout Doctor Who. I can certainly understand what Moffat was trying to do with the more definitive ending for the Doctor and Clara’s relationship, the Doctor having seemingly overcome his grief in Heaven Sent, but is so consumed by the temptation of saving Clara again that he leaps at it, putting the universe in danger and uncertain of how far he will go. I can get behind that idea if we didn’t have to sit through his usual bag of tricks

That being said, collectively I do enjoy watching these three episodes together as a single story, in many ways it’s the quintessential Steven Moffat story, everything we love and everything we hate about his show running years, and revisiting it almost a decade later, there’s something I kind of admire and appreciate about it. Who knows, maybe someday we may say the same about Chibnall’s works…though I doubt it.