And the final reveal: the Doctor was inside the Confession Dial. I'm not entirely sure how much sense that makes
The episode was finally available for watching on Amazon last night (usually, the eps. are available "first thing" Sunday morning). And this morning, after a night of really weird dreams, I figured it out:
Remember how the Doctor said that he didn't have any idea how a confession dial works, at the end of "Face the Raven"? And then, in this episode, that a) Timelords take a really long time to die, b) they desire to die watched over by their own kind, and c) that the teleporter returns you to the state you were in at the moment you entered "The castle"?
Okay. So what would usually happen is that when a Timelord is in the last stages of dying, someone watching over them who was in charge would teleport them into the dial then where the death monster (or the death monster illusion?) would extract their final confessions, they'd die-die (for real), and the sum of all their knowledge would be uploaded to the Matrix. ... If a Timelord is already weak with death, returning to the state they entered would not help them.
But in this case, the High Council made the mistake of trying that with the Doctor while he: a) was right at the beginning of a brand new regeneration cycle, and b) fairly "young" in that regeneration, to boot.
...It's basically a different version of the trap they tried with Trenzalore (if at first, you don't succeed...).
And I loved how that story about the mountain and eternity was revealed. It showed how each iteration of the Doctor's trials was slightly different than the last, and he wasn't simply stuck in a time loop.
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The episode was finally available for watching on Amazon last night (usually, the eps. are available "first thing" Sunday morning). And this morning, after a night of really weird dreams, I figured it out:
Remember how the Doctor said that he didn't have any idea how a confession dial works, at the end of "Face the Raven"? And then, in this episode, that a) Timelords take a really long time to die, b) they desire to die watched over by their own kind, and c) that the teleporter returns you to the state you were in at the moment you entered "The castle"?
Okay. So what would usually happen is that when a Timelord is in the last stages of dying, someone watching over them who was in charge would teleport them into the dial then where the death monster (or the death monster illusion?) would extract their final confessions, they'd die-die (for real), and the sum of all their knowledge would be uploaded to the Matrix. ... If a Timelord is already weak with death, returning to the state they entered would not help them.
But in this case, the High Council made the mistake of trying that with the Doctor while he: a) was right at the beginning of a brand new regeneration cycle, and b) fairly "young" in that regeneration, to boot.
...It's basically a different version of the trap they tried with Trenzalore (if at first, you don't succeed...).
And I loved how that story about the mountain and eternity was revealed. It showed how each iteration of the Doctor's trials was slightly different than the last, and he wasn't simply stuck in a time loop.