Emergency post. Nothing to do with CHIBSHOW 11, which will be finished at some point.

The incumbent Doctor is reaching the climax of their second season in the role. Events set in motion by the Master have brought us to the cusp of discovering an enormous, world-shattering secret – one that promises not only to expose a shocking untold history capable of destroying the Time Lords themselves, but to retroactively recontextualise the entire journey of the show’s central character, answering the question of why this whole adventure truly started. Brand new information, divulged by the antagonist in the second half of a series-opening two-parter, has us asking fevered questions about a mysterious figure from the past and what their cryptic title could mean. A sudden return to Gallifrey at the end of the penultimate episode heralds a reveal that will surely rewrite the lore wholesale, and force us to forever view the Doctor and the Doctor Who apocrypha in a new light.

I speak, of course, of Series 9 (2015). This run of episodes is somewhat infamous for its divisive approach to the season arc storyline – one of the most common questions people still seem to ask about Capaldi’s run is “wait, what was the Hybrid again?”

From the moment Davros first brings it up in The Witch’s Familiar, the question poses itself over and over again as the Doctor keeps running into various other hybrid candidates. Heaven Sent sees the Doctor declare the true nature of the Hybrid “a very dangerous secret” that “needs to be kept”, seemingly going to absurd lengths to do so. More than once we’re told that the Time Lord’s Matrix prophecies all point to the existence of a terrifyingly powerful hybrid entity, that will cause untold chaos – and it would seem the Doctor knows something about it, possibly even relating to the secret true reason he fled Gallifrey.

What we have here are recognisable signs, priming us to have a certain set of expectations: likely a Gallifrey-set epic, revolving around a Cartmel Masterplan-style shock twist retrofitted into the fictional history of the show. Plotty stuff involving Gallifreyan technology, Dalek mutants, etc, providing fuel for dozens of TARDIS Data Core articles. Probably lots of Time Lords shouting at each other. Maybe even a final showdown. But predominantly, the explosion of full-fat, creamy lore, with the forbidden thrill of Big Answers finally being provided to Doctor Who‘s Big Questions.

And yet…it’s also a Steven Moffat story, so anyone who’d been watching those for the last five years knew that their main expectation should be false expectations. By now this was part of the game. A Moffat story that seems to blatantly be going in one direction is, typically, also about the tension of whether or not it will actually go there – what the implications will be of telling one kind of story versus another, and usually an authorial favouring of option B over option A. When this happens, the final outcomes have a habit of polarising audiences; either you’re fist-pumping because we embraced the better version of the story, or you’re facepalming because Moffat just trolled you into wanting something he never had any intention of delivering.

The Hybrid, probably the most unsubtle example of this in his Doctor Who tenure, tends to split people into camps of “it’s great that the story was really about the Doctor’s relationship with Clara” and “what the fuck was the Hybrid? Hello???”. I think that positive read of the arc still sells it a little short. I postulate that the arc is not simply a story that appears to be about Doctor Lore Reveals then swerves to reveal it’s about Clara…it is, in part, a satire of the entire notion of a Doctor Lore Reveal to begin with. Not in a humorous sense, although it is hilarious in a couple of deeply underrated ways, but in being an outright attack on the whole premise of treating the Doctor’s origins as a void into which Lore should be engraved.

Rejecting the premises

ASHILDR: Am I right? Is it true?

DOCTOR: Does it matter?

The closest thing to an explanation the Hybrid ever gets is in the Doctor’s exchange with Lady Me, a scene so unrepentant in its violence that it might be half the reason anyone hates Hell Bent to begin with. It’s the moment of total obliteration for any hopes of some gigantic Dalek-Omega-Susan popping up; instead we are treated to a quiet conversation between two people in a darkened room, mainly consisting of the Doctor refusing to give clear answers. In the scene, the Doctor and Me rattle off a number of proposed explanations for what “the Hybrid” could have been referring to all this time; through this multiplicity of answers it becomes clear that no concrete answer is on offer.

As usual with Moffat, this is the point. He’s rejecting the main premise of the assumed Doctor Lore Arc here; the idea that the Doctor’s hidden past could ever be pinned down in a definable, singular “truth”. The main reason for this rejection is simple; we’re talking about a character who has passed through countless hands, each with their own idea about what the truth might be, and their own opinion about whether it matters at all. Moffat reminds us of this in spectacular fashion by dropping the biggest punchline of the season – the entire concept of the Hybrid can be read as referencing a certain widely-mocked retcon from the 1996 TV Movie.

MASTER: Fascinating. See that? That’s the retinal structure of the human eye. The Doctor is half human! No wonder.

DOCTOR: I’m half human. On my mother’s side.

DOCTOR: The actual prophecy specifies only two warrior races. The Daleks and the Time Lords have made assumptions, of course. And they would. Humans and the Mire, both warrior races. It fits perfectly.

ASHILDR: It’s an interesting theory.

DOCTOR: Do you have a better one?

ASHILDR: By your own reasoning, why couldn’t the Hybrid be half Time Lord, half human? Tell me, Doctor, I’ve always wondered. You’re a Time Lord, you’re a high-born Gallifreyan. Why is it you spend so much time on Earth?

DOCTOR: That’s your best theory? I’m the Hybrid? I ran away from Gallifrey because I was afraid of myself? That doesn’t make any sense.

ASHILDR: It makes perfect sense, and you know it.

The movie’s half-human thing has largely been reduced to the status of a fan in-joke; while the Eighth Doctor novels made various tortuous attempts to work with or around it – being conceived as part of a franchise refresh coinciding with the movie, they had a certain expectation to deal with the movie’s idiosyncrasies – since then it has occupied an ephemeral position in fan imaginations, going basically ignored by NuWho. It’s the quintessential example of someone trying to impose a startling new truth about the Doctor’s past, with a whole host of aesthetic assumptions and viewpoints (like ‘it’s okay to imply the Doctor’s the way he is because he’s genetically special!’) embedded in it, only to have it ultimately rejected.

Were you to ask Moffat for another, you might hear something along the lines of this quip from his recent afterword to Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “Doctor Who’s real name was revealed on telly in front of millions in 1979 (it’s Theta Sigma of course, but thankfully the audience chose to ignore it)”. The Doctors from The Brain of Morbius, faces implied to be pre-First Doctor Doctors but never officially enshrined as such by later stories, would be yet another. Attempts to lock down or tamper with things that most of the audience knows should be left alone – mysteries that shouldn’t be ruined, additions that distort and clutter the way we understand the central character – often do not come to glamorous ends. Even if only because they prove too cumbersome to have any storytelling longevity.

So Moffat abruptly, dramatically invoking one during the culmination of his big Doctor Lore Reveal arc is quite the statement. A slap across the face, even. Of the Hybrid answers we see discussed (Lady Me, a half-human Doctor, and the Doctor/Clara partnership), half-human is the only one that even approaches the territory of the Gallifreyan mythos epic many fans were anticipating. The desire for Doctor Lore is being mercilessly trolled here with one of its own greatest embarrassments – trolled with evidence of its own silliness.

Moffat plays it pretty much straight-faced, though, briefly proposing a half-human Doctor as a serious option, and not even having the Doctor offer a substantial rebuttal. (The sheer cheek of this is part of the humour, mind you.) What’s really key is that the Doctor instead asks “Does it matter?”, to which Ashildr promptly replies “No,” before moving onto her main point (more on that later). Rather than cynically pointing and laughing at these lore propositions, Hell Bent is doing something a little classier – forgiving them, even redeeming them, under the gentle condition that we understand no single one can ever be “the truth”. It’s only laughing at the notion that there is or ought to be any authority on the matter, let alone one that merits being taken seriously.

It doesn’t reject the idea that the Doctor might be hiding enormous secrets…but it chooses to let the mystery be, valuing the ambiguity as far more exciting than any singular answer some showrunner could contrive. The ambiguity, after all, is what has people coming up with so many possible answers and narratives. Rather than reduce it all to a guessing game whereby one answer turns out to be correct, Moffat recognises the right of those ideas to exist independently.

Elsewhere, the premise that Gallifrey’s destruction is inherently a source of huge stakes is quietly undermined – we do see characters “stand in its ruins” as the Time Lords prophesied of the Hybrid, yes, but its dilapidation is presented only as a natural and inevitable consequence of the heat death of the universe. (The fact it’s the Time Lords’ big ideas being deflated here is something else we need to look at again.) All the illusory promises of an epic narrative, grand battles, reams of Time Lord worldbuilding, shocking twists that will change everything forever, with stakes that have never been higher…the joke is on them.

But crucially, the joke isn’t everything. Offering a pleasure, however superficial, only to snatch it away, would be mere cynicism and uncharacteristic of Moffat as a writer. While the Big Doctor Lore Arc might be a feint, it’s our loss if we refuse to see the real epic for the ages playing out right in front of us; a song of grief ringing out in the final minutes of a dying reality…

Proposing new premises

It doesn’t need to be said again, you’ve heard it enough – “Hell Bent is really about the Doctor’s relationship with Clara, not with the Time Lords or Gallifrey!” It’s the most obvious piece of discourse about the episode imaginable. But having looked at what Moffat’s rejecting, we should look at this in terms of what kind of story Moffat is proposing as an alternative. It’s not quite as simple as just “it’s a small story about people instead of an epic about lore”, though that’s almost true.

NuWho is known for its much-debated story arcs, yet among them the Hybrid arc sticks out as something stranger than the usual. Part of the bait and switch is that there’s no big Time Lord plot point waiting to jump out in the finale, but the other part is in the nature of what “the Hybrid arc” even is as a running theme. RTD’s era trained fans to look for recurring key words such as Bad Wolf or Mr. Saxon, hints that a larger story was at play in the background and an explanation was on its way come the finale. This approach was de-emphasised when Moffat took over, with questions such as “what cracked the universe” or “who is River” frequently pushed forward in mid-series arc episodes instead, and Series 8 juggling a Series 1-ish continually-developing drama with occasional cryptic interludes set in Heaven.

Series 9, by about five episodes in, seems as though it might be a return to the Bad Wolf mode – the Doctor is continually stalked by the concept of hybrids, the words “a hybrid” seem to almost be following him around the universe – but the ultimate justification in Hell Bent transforms this from a mere tease into more of an outright literary device.

ASHILDR: What if the Hybrid wasn’t one person, but two?

DOCTOR: Two?

ASHILDR: A dangerous combination of a passionate and powerful Time Lord and a young woman so very similar to him. Companions who are willing to push each other to extremes.

DOCTOR: She’s my friend. She’s just my friend.

ASHILDR: How did you meet her?

DOCTOR: Missy.

ASHILDR: Missy. The Master. The lover of chaos, who wants you to love it, too. She’s quite the matchmaker.

DOCTOR: Clara’s my friend.

ASHILDR: I know. And you’re willing to risk all of Time and Space because you miss her. One wonders what the pair of you will get up to next

I don’t want to denigrate the literacy of Doctor Who fans too much, but it’s not hard to see why this was a difficult sell for so many of them. Having had a whole decade to get used to things being (on the whole) fairly literal, suddenly they were slapped with Moffat casually declaring the season’s recurring arc motif to have in fact been a gigantic metaphor. “Hang on a minute,” they cried. “You can’t just have themes and allusions and subtext. Where’s the plot? We were promised plot!”

And to be fair, they kind of were – but only in Moffat’s decision to invoke the past of the show, and the history of the Doctor, as his devices. These things traditionally occupy the position of lore, and the primary means by which fans engage with lore is as historical text – essentially flattening the stories into lists of facts, plot points described in wiki articles – so when a writer insists they’re engaging with it, or indeed that they’re going to add to it, a focus on plot and events is only to be expected.

Series 9’s approach, at least within Doctor Who, is a little radical. It uses the suggestions of the past (we know the Doctor stole a TARDIS and ran away from Gallifrey, we know there was a reason…) and ideas surrounding them, to comment on the storyline it’s telling in the present – to first and foremost develop the current story, rather than seriously try to edit the preexisting one.

The story in question? Clara’s ascension. Some sceptics of Hell Bent wonder what’s supposed to be the convergence between the Doctor/Clara story and a big Gallifrey narrative, but the answer is made straightforward by the ending. We’re returning to the home of the Doctor myth, its crucible, because we’re witnessing a new origin story deliberately paralleled (and intertwined) with the Doctor’s. A mysterious immortal takes an unusually knowledgeable companion on the run from Gallifrey indefinitely, in a stolen TARDIS that’s stuck with a kooky exterior – but not the super special Time Lord this time; just the Earth girl who got in too deep. (Thus the age-old hierarchy of Doctor Who is overturned, in a more drastic manner than Romana II’s independence in Warriors’ Gate.)

This is the other big new premise Moffat embraces instead of the Doctor Lore Arc. What if all this lore, rather than needing to be endlessly dredged up and rewritten, could instead simply be a launching pad for something else entirely? What if, while we think we’re watching a weighty grand finale for the Doctor, the secret origin of a new Doctor-like figure could be happening right under our noses, and – crucially – that this new story could be open-ended, given over to our imaginations, rather than locked down and integrated into a canon?

The floating signifier

But what none of that answers, of course, is why “the Hybrid”. The metaphor for two people who bring out each other’s worst tendencies is nice and clear, but where and why does this intersect with some just-made-up big mythic secret of the Doctor’s that we never actually hear? Is it really just the link with the half-human thing?

Well, no. Something that’s made blatant by the continued references to everything being a hybrid – Missy flat-out says the line, “Everyone’s a hybrid!” – is that it’s an idea with a ton of applications, and what’s important is not the question of “which of these hybrids happens to be the important one to the Doctor” but “why is the motif of hybridisation relevant to the Doctor”.

For the Time Lords, we can picture it as a kind of underlying ur-horror – their reputation is for lording their elite position above the rest of the cosmos, looking down with what Blake called “single vision” and preferring not to get mixed up in it, so the concept of synthesis is going to sound to them like an existential threat (though probably not quite as anathemic as it’d sound to the Daleks). For the Doctor, on the other hand, synthesis is a core part of his identity; not only does he forge relationships with all the diverse creatures of the universe, but there is something forever a bit inbetween about him. We saw him become that little bit more human, or more humane, through his bonding with Ian and Barbara; the people the Doctor meets become part of him. Compared to the average Time Lord, the Doctor is more empathetic, more willing to put himself in others’ shoes, negotiate that grey area of understanding between one consciousness and another.

If you look closely or stretch far enough, you can identify the idea of a Hybrid almost anywhere in the Doctor’s story – it’s no coincidence that people were speculating it could be anyone from Susan to Omega – and so, just through being known as “the Hybrid”, this mysterious entity begins to take on all possible meanings at once. With Moffat confrontationally suggesting that it’s the reason the Doctor left Gallifrey, the genesis of Doctor Who itself, the Hybrid Arc makes the bold claim – or threat? – to represent the ultimate secret. The most significant reveal in Doctor Who history. The twist that finally decides once and for all what the hell this story was, from the beginning. The big one.

And the absurdity of that should have been obvious. Such an impossibly huge thing could never live up to expectations. It only feels huge because it isn’t chained down into anything concrete, specific, and inevitably disappointing. This is a lot of words to say that the Hybrid is just intentionally vague, but that’s a very important signpost. It could mean almost anything, and that tells us that this “arc” is actually more a reflection on the concept of a big secret than about a genuine specific one. That brings us back to what we were thinking about earlier: Moffat is launching a critique of this kind of narrative, hacking it apart and seeing what more interesting shape it might be remade into.

We’ve been avoiding one pressing conclusion from all this; that we need not treat “the Hybrid is the telos of the entire show” and “the Hybrid is the Doctor and Clara” as mutually exclusive. Realistically they are, because it’s flat-out impossible for a character introduced in 2012 to be the inevitable endgame of a show from 1963, but the perversity of the idea is where its strength comes from. It’s ostentatious trolling, but also the lynchpin of Moffat’s new approach to lore reveals – he doesn’t even try to create something in the present that “pays off” (or, god forbid, “satisfyingly explains”) fifty-two years of past storylines, far from it. He instead takes the past itself lightly in his hand, and uses that to “pay off” both the present story and an imaginary future.

In the end, it’s a matter of perspective, and Moffat is offering a radical alternative one: what if everything we already know about the Doctor was simply the opening act to another, even larger and more impossible story? What if some human, who might otherwise have been a footnote in the Doctor’s story, was in fact – from a certain point of view – always the protagonist? (Certainly this lines up with how often Clara was pivotal in Moffat’s tweaking around with the Doctor’s past; Name of the Doctor, Day of the Doctor, and Listen being the big ones.) In other words, what if all these reams and reams of fictional history we’ve been accumulating were to not merely exist for their own sake, but to help bring something new and unpredictable to life – rather than capture and press possibilities down between wiki pages, render them preserved and dead like so many collected butterflies?

Speaking of which…

The lore-seekers

DOCTOR: If you wanted to know about the Hybrid, why didn’t you just ask me?

GENERAL: If the Hybrid is a threat to the people of this world, why don’t you just tell us?

When writing the in-universe portion of an article, imagine that you know everything about your topic, but that it no longer exists. Write in the past tense only. —TARDIS Data Core manual of style



It’s been the way of things since they were first introduced in The War Games – the Time Lords are no fun, and the Doctor is the one who tries his best to slip out of their clutches when it seems like they might impinge on his ability to have fun. It has different nuances in every interpretation, Moffat’s naturally being more concerned with storytelling and metafiction. In Hell Bent, we meet Time Lords who want nothing so much as to hear the Doctor’s confession – to learn that big secret he’s hiding. Viewed in light of how critical the Hybrid arc is of revealing such secrets, the Time Lords begin to look a little bit like Doctor Who fans.

True to form, they’re living at the end of the universe, a point in the time continuum when everything that ever happened is now past-tense. They’re hoping they can solve their uncertain future with answers from the past, and they view the Doctor as particularly special – the one who’s most likely to know about all this, the one who just seems to have the big universe-shattering secrets for some reason – so they demand the truth from him, putting him through a truly horrific ordeal inside a Confession Dial. When that proves not to be enough to crack him, the Time Lords try flattery, letting him use their resources; and this is where they make their big mistake.

To them, the dead of the past are simply another resource. Their oh-so-great computer, that’s been making the predictions for them in the first place, is literally made out of ghosts. Clara is just a bank of information from which lore can be mined, right? She died billions of years ago, and we’re at the end of the universe – it’s done, it’s fixed, it’s over, the page is written, the book is closed. So the Time Lords see no harm in extracting Clara from the end of her timeline to confer with the Doctor.

The Doctor, of course, has other ideas: he is insistent on treating her as a still-living, still-breathing story, with potential to go in new and startling directions. In Moffat’s view, it’s in the Doctor’s nature to cheat the Time Lords like this – he’s the eternal time traveller, the one always slipping through the clutches of single vision, and he can’t be bound by their miserably conservationist approach nor by any demands that he give up his mysteries. When he emerges from the Confession Dial and tells them “the Hybrid…is me,” of course he’s actually just trolling them by referring to Lady Me (the other hilariously cheeky punchline of this season). The unknown is what gives him his power, after all.

DOCTOR: It doesn’t matter what the Hybrid is. It only matters that I convinced them that I knew. Otherwise they’d have kicked me out, I’d have had nothing left to bargain with.

So the Doctor ends up taking a series of drastic actions to attempt to bring a dead past back to life, and it all goes arse-up for the Time Lords. (As a side note, the threatening presence of the ghostly Slider guards in the Cloisters suggests that the Time Lords’ dead lore bank is capable of opposing its masters; one wonders if their reliance on it has been leading them astray from the start. Are the Sliders secretly on the Doctor’s side? A strange story he tells Clara raises the possibility that they might be.)

But there are problems, and a price. The Doctor is still repeating the same old patterns, stealing a TARDIS and running away again; here Moffat uses the character’s history to emphasise his tendency to repeat himself. It stresses the need for something to break this cycle, for a new story to somehow emerge. And of course, the problem with trying to change the past is that in real life you can’t; the truth always asserts itself. Reviving Clara is just starting another doomed retcon, eventually to be tidied away by the community that needs a roughly coherent Web of Time and gets the final word on such things.

There’s only one possible way out, and it’s for Clara to escape the confines of lore altogether – to disappear from the Doctor, and from the screen, into the imagination, the undefined realm of pure possibility. Pray to god Jenna Coleman never agrees to a Big Finish boxset.

Embracing possibility

Throughout Series 9, Moffat plays around introducing new, curious little details that sound like lore. “Skull Moon”. “The Cloister Wars”. “The night he stole the moon and the President’s wife.” “The Master’s daughter.” “The Sliders talked to him, they showed him the secret passage out.” “I ran because I was afraid.” Afraid of what, though? It’s conspicuous that in a story which pretends to revolve around the Big Secret, we’re suddenly inundated with even more unknowns and complications – Hell Bent ultimately revels in the sheer messiness of all this. Moffat knows better than to try and reveal the big truth, but there’s no rule saying he can’t ask more questions, stimulate the imagination with more tidbits and add mystery upon mystery.

Importantly, pretty much none of these nuances threaten to subtract from or overrule anything that we, the audience, might have built for ourselves around the Doctor’s early days. If you like, William Hartnell’s Doctor still wandered off because he didn’t want to waste his life sitting around on Gallifrey; if you like, he was still just a bit more inquisitive than others of his kind, not the secret father of all Time Lord society – he still grew into the Doctor we know now through his original journeys in Season 1. It’s a major sticking point for Moffat, ideologically, that “the only place Doctor Who is real is in the headcanons of the people who watch it” (a quote from his interview with Christel Dee here.) He continues:

“…if you don’t want him to be the little boy in that bed [in Listen], that’s okay. Maybe it was the Master. You know, there could be all sorts of different interpretations if you don’t want that.” […] “He’s given conflicting accounts of why he runs around the universe, and I think it’s fine to add to those conflicting accounts so long as you don’t make one definitive.”

Like the audience has tended to be over the decades, Moffat’s aware that some things are self-evidently bad ideas. Stuff that makes the Doctor out to be some sort of chosen one, someone whose destiny was thrust on them by magic genetic bullshit rather than something they chose and forged for themselves – hero’s journey stuff where the Doctor has to find out the truth about their half-human parentage or whatever – things that flatten, demystify, banalify, and clamp down on the sense of possibility that Doctor Who‘s vexatious continuity currently offers. (Even the most notorious attempt at redoing the Doctor’s origins, the Lungbarrow saga, was conceived of originally as a way of making the Doctor more mysterious, less fathomable, by gesturing at an incomprehensibly distant and mythic past life. It’s contentious, and maybe ill-advised, but it doesn’t put me to sleep.)

Overall there’s a great freedom in letting the mystery be, and it’s powered Doctor Who as a concept for a very long time.

To try and unironically impose a Hybrid Arc, to retroactively attempt to crowbar in some Time Lordy or Daleky plot point, and try to – god forbid – explain how this all started, in ways that would inevitably prove bothersome and disappointing for anyone who actually cared…it would constitute a kind of self-cannibalisation of the show. It’d be the point at which you could tell Doctor Who was pretty much out of ideas, content to try and mine clicks from shock value instead of honouring its potential to do new things. Such was the real lesson of Series 9. May we never take it for granted again.

CLARA: What does it say?

MISSY: What does what say?

CLARA: His confession.

MISSY: It will only open when he’s dead.