Series 9, Episode 12 | Part 2 of 2 | First broadcast: 5 December 2015 | Writer: Steven Moffat | Director: Rachel Talalay
Cast
- Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor
- Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald
- Maisie Williams as Ashildr / Me
- Donald Sumpter as the President (Rassilon)
- Ken Bones as the General
- T’Nia Miller as the Female General
- Clare Higgins as Ohila
Summary
Having finally broken free of his confession dial after an unimaginable four and a half billion years of imprisonment, the Doctor arrives on Gallifrey, deposes the tyrannical Lord President Rassilon with the help of the Gallifreyan military, and takes over as President himself, learning that the entire ordeal was engineered to force him to reveal the truth about “the Hybrid.” Rather than confess, the Doctor uses his new authority to pluck Clara from the exact instant before her death on the trap street, suspending her in a stable time loop, and shoots dead a Time Lord general who tries to stop him, forcing a regeneration into a new form. Fleeing Gallifrey with Clara in a stolen TARDIS, the Doctor tries increasingly reckless methods to save her life permanently, ultimately traveling to the end of the universe, where the immortal Ashildr proposes that the Doctor and Clara together, being so alike, are themselves the prophesied Hybrid. Unable to bear separating from her yet unwilling to let her die, the Doctor resolves to erase his own memories of Clara instead, and the two agree to activate the device together, not knowing which of them the wipe actually affects — leaving the Doctor to wander a diner in Nevada afterward, having forgotten her face entirely, while Clara sets off with Ashildr on her own long way back around to her fated death.
Interesting Facts
- This episode marks Jenna Coleman’s final regular appearance as Clara Oswald, closing out an arc that began with her death in “Face the Raven” and continued through “Heaven Sent.”
- Timothy Dalton, who played Rassilon in the 2009-2010 special “The End of Time,” was invited to reprise the role but was unavailable, with Donald Sumpter cast as the new incarnation of the character instead.
- The stolen TARDIS interior the Doctor and Clara escape in is a deliberate recreation of the original console room design from the very first episode, 1963’s “An Unearthly Child.”
- The diner used for the episode’s closing scene had previously appeared in the Eleventh Doctor story “The Impossible Astronaut,” and the episode ends with the Doctor’s TARDIS producing a brand-new sonic screwdriver, replacing the “sonic sunglasses” used for most of the series.
- Maisie Williams’s Ashildr/Me appears for the final time in the series in this episode, having recurred across “The Girl Who Died,” “The Woman Who Lived,” and “Face the Raven,” and Clare Higgins reprises Ohila from the series opener and the 2013 minisode “The Night of the Doctor.”
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