Review of Heaven Sent
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
Heaven Sent is what, back in the day, my Star Trek: The Next Generation-watching friends and I would’ve called a Mind F*** Episode. You watch the whole thing thinking you understand the basic problem the crew (or, in this case, the Doctor) is facing until the very end, when one new piece of information changes how you look at everything else.
It’s a tricky stunt to pull off, especially given the nearly completely solo acting required of Capaldi. In the entire piece, there were only three other characters; only one of those ever spoke, and that was a single line to which the Doctor made no verbal response. In the hands of a lesser actor, it could have been disastrous.
Instead, it was suspenseful and engaging. That first time through, as is often the case with a Moffat script, you can see there are big hints being dropped, but you can’t necessarily put together the puzzle (at least I couldn’t—YMMV). Once you know the scoop, though, every little detail takes on new meaning, both just when thinking back on it and upon repeated viewing.
However, I found I enjoyed this episode more than almost any Moffat-penned script since he took over as showrunner. Usually Moffat’s episodes start to unravel upon closer inspection. That’s not the case for me this time. Only one thing bothers me, and it’s something I can fan-theory away if I try. In my book, that makes this episode a huge win in the Moffat-as-writer category.
One of the really appealing aspects of this particular story, in my opinion, is how we are allowed inside the Doctor’s head more than ever before. Right from the beginning, we see one of the Doctor’s oldest fears, in the form of the Veil—a creature that could very easily have come across as melodramatic (or just plain pants), if not for the way Capaldi sold the Doctor’s genuine terror.
At the time, he identifies it as rooted in a deep, personal fear, saying, “When I was a very little boy, there was an old lady who died. They covered her in veils, but it was a hot, sunny day, and the flies came. It gave me nightmares for years.” In and of itself, that’s not so bad. But as with so much else in the episode, it’s when we look at it with later knowledge that it becomes horrific.
“People always get it wrong with Time Lords,” he says as he begins his day-and-a-half-long crawl back to his point of entry. “We take forever to die. Even if we’re too injured to regenerate, every cell in our bodies keeps trying. Dying properly can take days. That’s why we like to die among our own kind. They know not to bury us early.” In that context it’s easy to see how an old lady draped with veils being swarmed and slowly consumed by flies—too far gone to regenerate, but still conscious—might haunt a child.
We’re also made privy to the Doctor’s problem-solving process in those split seconds he needs to make clever decisions. (Remember when Missy asked Clara how the Doctor survived a recalled incident way back in The Witch’s Familiar, and she concluded that he’d made the necessary calculations in nanoseconds? Yeah, we’re at the part of the series where all the little hints Moffat’s dropped along the way are coming back together.) It seems he retreats to a mental version of the TARDIS to work through what needs to be done. (Forget a “mind palace,” Sherlock—the Doctor’s got a mind TARDIS!)
It works because without a Companion to talk to, the audience would never understand what the Doctor knows or how he reaches his conclusions. Thus we get the Doctor talking to himself via the veneer of his recently-to-this-version-of-his-consciousness deceased friend. We follow the “trail of breadcrumbs” along with him, until the moment he figures it out. (How long did it take you to catch up with him? It took me an embarrassingly long time…)
We watch in increasing horror, finally understanding how many times he has to repeat this same process. [Aside: When I realized that he got further into the Grimm’s fairy tale as he punched farther into the wall because it took just that much longer for the Veil to reach him, I was duly impressed with that level of detail.] Every time he teleports in and speaks into the silence, “I’m the Doctor; I’m coming to find you; and I will never, ever stop,” we feel the true weight of that conviction.
But this is where that one niggling inconsistency comes in. If he’s been following these same clues set out for him millennia (and more!) ago—coming across the same oddities, making the same decisions, and reaching the same conclusions every time—who set up the breadcrumbs in the first place?
Those who sent him into the Confession Dial, those who were listening in to the interrogation, were surely only trying to get that last juicy confession. Didn’t it have to have been the Doctor himself who somehow set up the path toward that final wall of azbantium he chipped away at for two billion years, knowing that it was the only way out? Or did the Time Lords expect him to crack in the face of such an unbreachable obstacle, thus either dying a final death or yielding his secrets to them? If the former is the case, it’s difficult to see how events progressed differently the very first time through; if the latter, it’s difficult to see how the Time Lords could so severely underestimate the Doctor, given all their previous experience with him.
Either way, it makes a relatively minor plot hole, far overshadowed by the brilliant acting and keen direction of an otherwise sharp script. The only time I felt a wobble was that final line, as the Doctor declares that “the Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins is me.” There are only two ways I can see this going, and I’m not a fan of either.
The first is a literal, obvious interpretation: the Doctor is the Hybrid, made from the warrior races of Time Lords and humans. I’ve done my best to erase that errant line from The Movie from my consciousness, but alas, I cannot. On the one hand, it would be nice to have another way to legitimize McGann’s Doctor within the canon of the televised series. On the other, I’d be bitterly disappointed if Moffat took the one piece of on-screen Doctor Who lore I simply cannot stomach and built an entire series around it.
Another interpretation which I’ve seen proposed sits slightly better with me: he actually said, “…is Me.” In other words, Ashildr is the Hybrid. This option also means the Hybrid is part human. That’s hardly surprising, given what species is telling these tales of the Doctor’s travels, even if it is a bit tiresome.
So we’ve come nearly to the end of another series, and all that’s left is the tying up of loose story threads (I’m trying not to cringe as I type that, but failing). The lead-up is one of the best I’ve seen in a good, long while, and I can’t imagine anything that would keep me from enjoying watching this episode over and over in the future. We’ll just have to wait and see whether or not the conclusion can break the Moffat-two-parter mold and fail to suck.
Heaven Sent?
The first time I watched it through I was impressed. It was creeeepy. It was intracate. It was a puzzle.
But even so I was a little irritated. The Doctor seemed to be wallowing in self pity just a little too much.
I realized that all the skulls were The Doctor’s skulls as soon as I saw them. It was the only thing that made sense and I recognized them as his skulls. (I read that the design of the skulls was based on Peter Capaldi’s bone structure.)
The end where he allowed the monster to come up behind him and fry his head just didn’t ring true. If he had dodged around the Veil and led him to the far side of the castle and dashed back he would have had 82 minutes to work on the wall. He could have done that over and over. And he could have brought a tool to work on the wall with, rather than breaking all the bones in his hand over and over. The Doctor is smarter than that. Or he could have brought some furniture to burn and created another copy of himself so one could work on the wall while the Veil chased the other around the castle. There was stuff he could have done other than hit the wall with his hand 3 times before getting fried.
The person who set up the clues was The Doctor. He created clues that would mean something to him, just like he wrote “bird” as his last act every time he died. He painted the portrait of Clara and burried the “look for room 12” message and left his jewler’s loupe by the painting. Earlier versions of him didn’t have the same clues to follow so they did different things. Once he had set up all the clues to lead him to room 12 and the wall of super diamond he followed the same path over and over and over for millions of years.
I also have been trying to forget that line in the movie where The Doctor says he is half human. The New Who has spent so much time painting The Doctor as a liar who distorts the truth at the drop of a hat that I could safely believe that The Doctor was lying about that. I really don’t want him to turn out to be half human. Time Lords have 2 hearts and regenerate and even though they LOOK like humans there must be a tremendous genetic mismatch. I can’t imagine that regular sex would produce offspring between a Time Lord and a human. The only “hybrid” of Time Lord and human I can see is… Jenny, the Doctor’s “daughter” that was created by a human cloning machine. But we haven’t seen that character reciently and I see no way she could be on Gallifrey. (Though if she showed up in a future Capaldi episode it would be nice.)
Logic in a Moffat episode
When one uses too much logic when analyzing a Moffat episode, you can always find flaws, can’t you. 🙂 As you present it here, I can see how there might be “smarter” ways for the Doctor to go about his business. Upon further reflection, though, I think the ones you listed wouldn’t work.
As I interpreted it, he could get a maximum of 84 (or whatever the number was) minutes away from the Veil before he wouldn’t be able to escape it and would have to offer a confession to stop it and begin a new 84-minute cycle. Thus, once he’d opened the door to the final wall, he’d already run out of all the time he had for dodging it.
Also, the furniture was part of the closed energy loop, and wouldn’t have added the energy to the transporter that it required. He had to use his remaining life energy to provide that kick. So yes—there was probably something else that could’ve been done, but I don’t believe it’s quite so straightforward.
Besides—this way is more dramatic. 😉
Maximum time.
As I intrepreted it, if The Doctor got to the lowest part of the castle and waited for the Veil to ALMOST touch him and then ran really fast to the tippy top, as far away as it was possible to get from the place he was before, it would take 82 (or 84) minutes for the Veil to catch up with him because it moved so slowly. So since the room with the diamond wall is accessed through the topmost part of the castle, if The Doctor started at the bottom, waited for the Veil to almost touch him he could run back up to the room with the diamond wall and have 84 whole minutes to work on digging through it before the Veil caught up with him. But why cut it so fine? Start at the bottom, race up the stairs and spend 70 minutes working on the wall. Then leave and go get some lunch, catch a quick nap, whatever, in some other part of the castle. Then lure the Veil back to the bottom, race back up the stairs and have another whole hour + to work on it again.
If the furniture is part of the closed loop then collect some skulls from the bottom of the sea. Since they keep accumulating they don’t reset and are not part of the closed loop. Or carve a note with better instructions and leave it with the skulls so the next Doctor knows what he’s up against faster and has more opportunity to make a good plan.
There has to be SOMETHING he could do. Accepting that you have three blows with your fist on a harder than diamond wall before you die and generate a new Doctor who has to figure it out all over again is crazy. No wonder it took him several million years.
Of course, he’s a time traveller and the Doctor who finally broke through the wall had been in the castle for maybe a week so for HIM it was completed quickly. And once he got out of the castle he could presumably summon the TARDIS or travel back to the hour after he left it if he was so inclined. So all that wasted time wouldn’t matter. However long it took to get through the wall subjectively he would end up at the same point in spacetime at the end.