An alternate reading of Whouffaldi that might make Hell Bent a bit sadder. We know the Doctor and Clara do not communicate their feelings directly. Yet we know from copious on-screen evidence that the Doctor was in love with Clara and vice-versa. But what if the Doctor and Clara never properly realized how the other felt until the very end? I’ve read a few comments suggesting that Clara may not have truly realized how much the Doctor was in love with her till the Cloisters, for example.
(Ok, but yeah… I kind of had that reading of canon, too. Clara’s reaction to what he had undergone just to save her… it was so raw. I think she always knew he cared about her but not to that depth until that point. In Face the Raven, I wondered if she didn’t want him to say the words because she figured he wouldn’t mean them the way she really wanted to hear them… which is why she changed her mind in the cloisters and said it, at last.
But I choose to ignore all of that in favor of the THEY ARE TOTALLY SPACE MARRIED fanon)
say you love me 