I'm fairly new to the show (about three years) and even newer to this forum. (Today.)
I've seen all of New Who so far, though.
Hell Bent to me, was like vomiting; nobody ever wants to do it, and the lead up to it is in some ways even worse, but once it's done, it done, and you feel better.
I didn't get into Clara at all, so I am not sad to see her go. (Any of the 15 times it seemed like she was going.) She always felt to me like someone who was keeping a seat warm between Amy and the next "real" companion, even though she was on longer than Amy. My true dislike for her started when she jumped into the time stream, and basically became the most important being in the history of the Doctor, and hence the show. (That particular TARDIS the First Doctor stole was HER idea? Really?)
So, in one sense, I don't care how the character is gone, so long as she's gone. Never understood the appeal, so I'm happy to have it over and done with, even in an episode that was, to me, not great.
Which means I don't understand why, at the end of this season the Doctor was made insane by her presence/absence. It was to me, like, okay, nobody has ever meant more to the Doctor in all his centuries than this woman...if you say so, writers...because the on-screen chemistry and the behavior of the characters didn't show that to me.
As for the other non-Clara stuff that bothered me about the episode...
-THAT was the Doctor's return to Galifrey? A decade in the reboot with the home plamet being only mentioned, or seen in passing and such, and when the Doctor is at last back on it's soil what do we get? A five minute coup. The 50th Anniversary established that his purpose was to be headed home "the long way round," which was ignored for most of the Capaldi era. It finally happens, and we get the Doctor having a bowl of soup, and blowing an unarmed ally into their 11th regeneration for virtually no reason. (Other than to shock viewers.)
-Also with Galifrey...the great moment of 13 Doctors and their TARDIS's converging on the planet in the 50th in the nick of time to send the planet away into a pocket universe...kind of the entire climax of the 50th. And when the subject of the planet being in the regular universe again is brought up, we get, "I guess they got out somehow."
-The extraction thing...there is nobody else anywhere in all of his travels he would choose to save while he was there? That's how much Clara eclipses everybody else?
-Another useless "Villains Greatest Hits" number like we had in Trenzalore for about five seconds...
-"Me" at the end of the whole universe watching even "the other immortals die." That very contradiction just bothered me to no end. What about that goofy guy she gave the other "disk" thing to? The one that was scheduled to be hanged earlier this year? A human with the exact same treatment as her, and yet, never mind, "Me" is the only living thing left in the universe.
-The (as far as I can tell) pointless call back to the diner from the Impossible Astronaut. Was it just for the "coolness" of Capaldi saying "Amy and Rory"?
There was more foolery yet, if I could remember it.
In the end, I'm in the anti-Moffet camp. He seems constitutionally incapable of writing a straight up adventure anymore. Every episode just about is part of an arc that wraps around the very mythology of everything there is about the Doctor. He mad his character rewrite the show's whole history, and the same character comforted a child-Doctor up in the loft, even giving him a little toy figure. I thought for sure before it was all said and done that we would find out Clara is in fact his mother...or better yet, is somehow in fact the planet Gallifrey made into a person. Or is the TARDIS...or all of the above. I wouldn't be surprised if any of that happened.
Frankly what I most fear is that Coleman will in fact be a future regeneration of the Doctor...since we know that "important" faces can influence a regeneration, ala Capaldi from "Pompeii."
I started watching the show for weird adventures and chasing bad guys, or saving planets that can't save themselves. Each year there seems to be less and less of that, and more and more "huge revelations" that in the end go no where.
At least half of the posters here seem to think in similar manner to this. I am glad, because most of the places I go to see reviews of the reason season consider it all so very brilliant.
Oh well. Can't wait to see 12 as just 12, without Clara. I think Stormeggedon as originally seen would make a more interesting companion than she was.
