Doctor Who Series 9 First Impressions: Episode 11 (Heaven Sent)

(There's spoilers in these here parts. You hath been warned.)

Well, fuck. Now in four or five weeks, when I do my great big ranking of all the Series 9 episodes from best to worst, there's going to a great big fight for the top spot. Between this and last week's. Where was this quality of episode when we had the fucking Fisher King monster? Of course, this is an episode that vastly improves on a rewatch. On first watch, I had no idea what it was doing and just got floored by the ending. Which tends to happen a lot when I watch this show; I'm sitting there, not really feeling it, and then the ending comes and makes me go "oh goddamnit, well done, you're a masterpiece". Usually it's Peter Harness episodes that do that, though! Not stuff penned by Moffat himself! Still, holy shit. Heaven Sent is a goddamn masterpiece, for many reasons, but it's also really hard to unpack. I'm going to try.

This, more than anything, feels like Doctor Who that has blended together a bunch of my all-time favorite things into one neat little 55-minute package. For starters, the setting. We're in a gigantic castle where the walls are ever shifting, opening and closing passage to different rooms. That's House Of Leaves territory, and keep in mind that "bigger on the inside" was a source of abject terror in House Of Leaves, rather than the whimsy and wonder of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is being corrupted. More than that. Doctor Who is being stalked. In this labyrinth of life where the walls keep changing, the Doctor is being relentlessly pursed by "the Veil". Now, the Veil has one important rule to not getting killed by it, which is very Moffat-esque and all and we'll get to it, but... why is it a Veil? Because the Doctor once saw a dead old woman in death shrouds surrounded by flies, and was terrified of it ever since. The Veil is just the defense of this place, shifting its corporeal form into a fear of the Doctor's in order to unsettle him further. That's the titular monster of Stephen King's It! Except the Veil doesn't actually want to eat the Doctor, and has a higher purpose... but becoming a primal deep-seated childhood fear of his is totally Its modus operandi. Incidentally, House Of Leaves and Stephen King's It are my two favorite horror novels. So, I'm already grinning like an idiot but also greatly unsettled by this place... but there's so much more. Like we keep saying in the video reviews I take part of, though... we can't talk about that yet. 

So much of this episode is... well, a little slow. It's Peter Capaldi semi-talking to himself for 35 minutes until we come to the big revelation, and all the stakes and emotional cores contained within that elevate this thing to top of the class. Until then, we have an exploration of this place, and attempting to learn the rules of it in order to survive. The rules of the Veil are soon sussed out; it only stops trying to kill you when you confess some hidden truth to it. So. Truth, or consequences. The Doctor gives it the truth at least three times, and we learn more as we go. The Doctor is afraid of death. The Doctor left Gallifrey all those ages ago out of fear... and the Doctor knows what the Hybrid is. Ah. So that is our arc this time. I'm going to hold my tongue on Hybrid talk until next week, since we don't know where this is going to go yet. Stupid temporal grace. There are other mysteries and clues peppered in here that make sense at the end. The set of clothes waiting by the fire. The skulls in the sea. The stars being 7000 years out of alignment. The Doctor is inside a puzzlebox of death. Holy fuck. Moffat did it. You son of a bitch, this is the puzzlebox for Series 9 and you have trapped the Doctor inside. All alone. Well. Not alone.

Clara is here. Well, not here but also here. She sleeps inside the Doctor's mind, and he is who he appeals to with his explanations of how this place works. His ideal Clara, sitting in his mental mindscape TARDIS. Here's where I have to go back, way back, to my old Boss Dungeon writeups. In Into The Dalek, on Clara helping the Doctor get over himself and save the day to some degree, I wrote this:

Clara, the schoolteacher, teaching a centuries-old alien to let go of his own preconceptions and remember what he's learned from his interactions with the "broken" Dalek. The writing for Clara has generally improved with this new series; instead of the blank cipher "mystery girl" to be solved at the end of the series from last year, we have a proper equal to the Doctor. Someone who can learn from him, and help him learn. What a great team.

Eventually I went off on big tangents about Clara becoming the Doctor's dark mirror, falling into a downward spiral of becoming a chronic liar and risk-taker who nonetheless has agency over her stories and helps to save the day. As we saw last week, this killed her. She took a risk, a risk the Doctor would take if he was not as informed, and the risk got her killed. Now that she haunts this episode, there's no need for a dark mirror of the Doctor. Instead is this older version of Clara: Clara-as-teacher. Her influence in the Doctor's mind, as he remembers her, is a proxy for his own determination to stay alive by asking the right questions. In his grief and confusion, he needs the steady hand of his teacher to figure things out. The real Clara Oswald wouldn't let the Doctor slack or give up, and this ghostly Clara doesn't either. I like this a lot. Even in death, the Doctor's staying on the good path that Clara was keeping him on. Whether or not that will stick when he gets his hands on the people who put him in this situation next time is up for debate... but on to the main course.

Eventually, all that stands between the Doctor and freedom is one last confession; tell all about the Hybrid, and presumably he can escape. He wants to. He really wants to, because of the alternative. That leads him to an angry tirade berating his mental Clara, asking, no, demanding to know why he isn't allowed to lose this one. Why she keeps insisting he fight on. Because he's the Doctor, and there's always another way. He breaks the rules, and wins by other ways, even if the cost is high... and the cost is mighty high. The Doctor has all but given up because nothing he does will bring Clara back, but she brings him back from the brink and helps him gain the one victory he can... although, as I said, the cost is one hell of a cost. See, this isn't the first Doctor to be put in this situation. This entire thing is a time loop. The Doctor arrives, the episode happens, and when faced with a harder-than-diamond wall, and the Veil approaching? He punches the wall. As much as he can until the Veil touches him and leaves him mortally wounded. From that, he crawls his way back to the teleporter room, in his death throes, and hooks himself up to it, burning up his life force to create a new copy of himself that arrives newly minted in the castle. Everything resets in this castle, except the firmness of the diamond wall... and the skulls in the sea. Over two billion years, over an infinite number of Doctors, not a single one gives in to the temptation to tattle about the Hybrid. They choose the hope that their inner Clara Oswald inspires them to believe in, and in doing so an infinite number of Doctors die. They face their own ravens, and Clara Oswald is the one who lets them be brave. Over and over this shit happens, and the Doctor never gives up. For two billion years the Doctor chooses death, wearing down the harder-than-diamond wall with his bare fists over an infinity of cycles until one time, at long last, he breaks through. Which, as is Moffat's style, inspired by a fairy tale. The Doctor is the bird, sharpening his beak over two billion years and a single second of infinity, all because Clara Oswald inspired him to be brave. Holy shit. It's here I'd like to offer two other perspectives on this infinite Law of Cycles business, both cribbed from video game talk. EJR Tairne's brilliant summary that this is "Scherzo crossed with I Wanna Be The Guy, except set in the world of Myst" (which, given how much I've been bitching about masocore gameplay/difficulty replacing the actual difficulty of retro video games in indie retro-style platformers these days, particularly tickles me), and Brightcoat's observations about how this episode is similar to... Dark Souls. Which, another hard video game I now love. This episode was made for me.

Then the ending. The Doctor is free. The entire world was a confession dial. Makes sense, given the Veil was stopped by confessions. Where are we now? Gallifrey. The long way round. Just like the Doctor said he would, and he meant it. At long last, after the disasters of the late 80's, after the cancellation and the Wilderness Years, after the Time War and its Last Days and the Day Of The Doctor reaffirming that Doctor Who is a success again... we're back on Gallifrey. What will happen next, I don't know. What I do know is that the Doctor is very, very cross. To put it another way?

Next time: The Doctor is Hell Bent.