Heaven Sent

[daibhidc]

Woah.

That was definitely the most intense episode of Doctor Who I've seen for a while. And no characters except the Doctor, the entirely silent monster, and voice/back-of-head Clara.

We will start with the niggle; all the sand and the monster's viewpoint appearing on screens and it turns out this has nothing to do with the Sandmen from "Sleep No More"?

That aside (and the judgement from the internet at the time would suggest that very few people will be disappointed by a failure to link something to "Sleep No More") the whole visual of the revolving castle was nicely done. And the monster as the inevitability of death - I've complained a couple of times this season about monsters not fitting their conceptual role in the story, but this one nailed it.

I liked the Doctor going into his mental TARDIS to work things out - a bit of Sherlock creeping in, Moffatt? Except Sherlock wouldn't tolerate the idea of John hanging around his mind palace asking questions, whereas the Doctor needs someone to show off to. And it made for a good visual with unconsiousness/death being represented by the TARDIS powering down.

The explanation of what's actually been happening is clever. And not really timey-wimey, which surprised me. It also gets into all that philosophical stuff about is a copy the same as the original and so on which I studiously avoid on the Transhuman Space discussion boards, so I'll ignore it again here. (You do have to vaguely wonder about the first Doctor, who must have managed to work it out at least as far as using himself to power the teleporter without any clues. And the following ones probably wouldn't have had several of them.)

And the final reveal: the Doctor was inside the Confession Dial. I'm not entirely sure how much sense that makes; I thought the Confession Dial already contained his confession, that was the point of it. "A Time Lord's Confession Dial contains a castle that will force him to confess if he's teleported directly into it" doesn't really work for me. On the other hand, another great visual.

And the final final reveal, the Confession Dial was outside the Capitol! It's all going to kick off now...

No, wait, final, final, final reveal: the Doctor is the hybrid! Is half-human canon? And why was he freaking out everytime someone could concievably be described as a hybrid if he knew that all along?

Comments

[john_amend_all]

Unless, as I've seen people suggesting, his last line wasn't "The hybrid [...] is me", but "The hybrid [...] is Me."

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, by my count, there are (at least) three different hybrid variations within this specific season (Timelord/Dalek, Ashildr/Mire, and Zygon/Osgood/?? in chronological order)*, without having to refer back to a TV movie that aired before most of the audience were even born.

I liked the Doctor going into his mental TARDIS to work things out - a bit of Sherlock creeping in, Moffatt?

Actually, the mnemonic technique that's often called the Memory Palace (its official name is method of loci (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci)) has been known and used since at least the days of Cicero in ancient Rome. And it makes sense that both Sherlock and the Doctor would use it. Sherlock likely read about it. The Doctor would probably claim he taught Cicero how it works... ;-)

*And maybe Rasmussen/Sandman, depending on how you count.

[pedanther]

My take is the same as John's: Moffat's pulling our leg, and the Doctor is actually saying "The hybrid is Me". And I suspect Moffat's going to pull a Prophecy Wording Twist, and it will turn out that the Time Lords spent all this time worried for nothing, that the prophecy about the hybrid walking through the ruins of Gallifrey doesn't mean she's going to bring about Gallifrey's ruin, only that when Gallifrey finally falls into ruin Me will still be there.

This of course raises the question of how Me got to Gallifrey in the first place. (Which would have to be answered anyway, since she's in the Next Time preview.) This episode implies an answer, though I'm not sure if it's going to be the true answer or just Moffat pulling our other leg:

The other side of the "I really wasn't travelling in time" reveal is that the Doctor is presumably equally correct about his other estimate, that the teleporter hadn't moved him more than a light year from London. Which might just be because he was teleported into the confession dial, and then the confession dial was carried to Gallifrey by other means, but then he'd presumably have something more to say about the position of the stars. The other possibility - implied by the Doctor's line to the boy about having come the long way - is that the confession dial was just sitting on Earth the whole time, as Earth gradually became Gallifrey around it...

[sabremeister]

I interpreted it to mean that The Doctor has had enough. He's just spent 2 billion years in a walking nightmare, enabled by the traditions of his own people, who have frequently behaved as complete knobheads, and he's fed up with it all. He's finally home, after having seen it effectively destroyed by his own hand, and he's going to do something about it. He's decided that since he's already done the things that The Hybrid is prophecised to do, he may as well be The Hybrid.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

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.