Story 262: Heaven Sent

In which the teleport takes the Doctor from the Trap Street where Clara died, to a mysterious stone chamber in an unknown location. Seconds before, a dying man - his face badly burned - had operated machinery to bring him here. He had then died, his body crumbling rapidly to dust leaving only his skull. 

The Doctor sets out to explore and finds that the building seems to resemble a castle.

He believes that he will be able to estimate his location once he sees the night sky.

As he moves around the castle corridors he discovers a number of monitor screens. When they activate he sees point of view images of someone - or something - which is moving inexorably towards where he is located. He makes his way to a courtyard garden where he finds a spade and what looks like a grave.

A large figure is watching him, its body hidden by a shroud, and it is this which has been stalking him.

He takes another corridor and comes to a door with the number 12 on it - but beyond is a solid wall. As the hooded creature approaches he shouts out loud that he is afraid to die. The creature suddenly freezes, along with the flies which were buzzing around it. The entire castle infrastructure then begins to reset itself, like clockwork.

He enters a bedroom and finds an ancient, flaking portrait of Clara on the wall. The shrouded figure begins to stalk him once again. When it enters the bedroom he has no choice but to leap out of the window. However, he has worked out how high up they are, and the fact that there is water below. Diving into the water, he sees thousands of human skulls littering the sea bed. Back in the castle he comes across a chamber with a roaring fire - and a fresh set of dry clothes. In trying to work out what is going on - and the means by which he ascertained what was beyond the window he jumped through - the Doctor enters a mental space, which resembles the TARDIS console room. He sees an image of Clara here and bounces ideas off her.

The Doctor once again goes exploring the castle as the shrouded figure comes stalking him. He recalls this creature from his childhood, when he had seen a dead body and been terrified by it. It is known as the Veil. He finds himself back in the courtyard with the grave. This contains a clue pointing him back to the door marked "12". The creature reaches him and he once again shouts out that he did not leave Gallifrey because he was bored - but because he was scared. The Veil freezes and the castle resets itself once again.

He now knows that he is being interrogated, and that the Veil has been created to scare him into making a confession. It is halted every time he speaks a true statement. He discovers that the castle stands in the middle of a vast ocean, out of sight of land, so he has nowhere to escape to. he also works out how much time he has before each of the attacks by the Veil. He goes back to the teleport room and discovers a skull lying on the floor, with electrical leads attached to it. The word "Bird" is drawn in the dust. Up on the roof he discovers that the stars do not match anything close to Earth when he was taken away from it - but they do match the pattern for 7000 years in the future.

The Veil attacks once more and this time the Doctor tells it that he knows that the Hybrid is real and knows what it is. It freezes, the castle resets. He returns to door 12 and this time finds a corridor, at the end of which is a wall of a solid diamond-like substance called Azbantium. He sees the word "Home" beyond, and knows this is what he must breach to escape. He punches it.

This time when the Veil attacks he refuses to tell it any more about the Hybrid. The creature seizes him and burns him. He crawls back to the teleport room and attaches electrical leads to his head, then uses regeneration energy to power the device. As his body crumbles to dust - leaving only the skull with the leads attached - the Doctor steps out of the teleport, reset to the day he first arrived.

The whole process repeats itself, over and over again. Each time the Doctor can tell from the stars that millions of years have passed, and his punching of the Azbantium wall are starting to make a tunnel into it. He had left the word "Bird" as a clue for himself that a tiny peck from a beak on a mountain would, over a long enough timespan, reduce it to nothing.

Eventually 4 billion years have passed, and the Doctor smashes his way through the wall. He emerges onto a familiar landscape - that of Gallifrey. He sees the citadel of the Time Lords on the horizon. It transpires that he has been trapped within his own Confession Dial - the Time Lords determined to find out what he knows about the Hybrid due to the legend that it will destroy them. He sees a small boy and sends him to the citadel with the message that he has arrived and knows what has been done to him. Knowing he is still being observed, he announces that he is the Hybrid...

Heaven Sent was written by Steven Moffat, and first broadcast on Saturday 28th November, 2015. 

It formed the first part of the series finale, dealing with the aftermath of the death of Clara in Face the Raven. It also moved on the series story arc of the Hybrid. The Doctor claims this is him, but we will later discover that there is more to it than this.

Most of us count this as the first half of a two-parter because of the title structure - Heaven Sent and Hell Bent, which come from the saying "Heaven sent, yet Hell bent". To be Hell Bent suggests determination to do something, irrespective of the cost.

Many have questioned if the titles are the right way round, as "Hell Bent" can suggest the events of this episode, and the Doctor is trapped in a form of Hell.

There's also some dispute as to whether or not this is really the middle part of a trilogy, which opens with Face the Raven - with Heaven Sent picking up exactly where Raven ended, and Hell Bent doing the same with this instalment.

The episode is remarkable in that it is designed to be a solo performance by Peter Capaldi. Clara does appear but only in the TARDIS "mind palace" scenes. The Veil never speaks, and nor does the boy at the conclusion. Moffat was concerned that such an episode might not work, but knew that in Capaldi he had an actor who could pull it off.

The notion of the "mind palace" was lifted wholesale by Moffat from his Sherlock series.

The story is all about grief - how the Doctor comes to terms with the death of Clara whilst at the same time trying to unravel the mystery of where he is and why he is there.

The Veil was performed by Jami Reid-Quarrell, who had been seen as Colony Sarff earlier in the series. The creature is only named as such in the end credits.

Though mostly seen from the back, Clara was played by Jenna Coleman throughout the "mind palace" scenes. The boy was an uncredited local extra.

Overall, a superb episode, with a tour-de-force performance by Capaldi at its heart. This was nominated for a number of Prime Time Emmys in the US - for Capaldi's acting, Moffat's writing and Rachel Talalay's  direction. The only pity is the inclusion of Clara, otherwise it would truly have been a single-hander.

Things you might like to know:

• Two Welsh castles were employed to represent the Doctor's prison - Cardiff and Caerphilly.
• The Gallifrey landscape was filmed at Fuertaventura in the Canary Islands - the same location as used for Skaro in The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar.
• The Doctor mentions having come to Gallifrey "the long way round" which refers back to The Day of the Doctor, where we first learned that the planet had been saved. The Doctor mentioned then that he would find it again by going "the long way round".
• Fandom had always been led to believe that the Doctor left Gallifrey because he was bored - something he articulated to his companions in The War Games. Here he claims this was not the case - and the Veil accepts it so it must be the truth.
• The "Bird" clue takes the Doctor to a Brothers Grimm story, where a shepherd boy tells an emperor about how a small bird can destroy a mountain made of diamond if given long enough, by way of explaining how many seconds there are in eternity.
• In a BBC America documentary in 2013 Moffat had described the Doctor as the sort of person who would throw themselves out of a window and work out what to do next on the way down - something which he actually does here.
• No Cybermen. Up to this point, Moffat had always included Cybermen in the penultimate episode of his series, and he'll do so again for Series 10.
• No TARDIS. The TARDIS does not feature in this story, other than as a mental image.
• The Doctor's final line states that "the Hybrid is me". In writing, as printed on the scripts, the last word was capitalised as "Me" - giving away the clue that the Hybrid is Ashildr. Up to now there has been a suggestion that the Hybrid was a Time Lord or human / Dalek creation, but the Doctor points out that the Daleks would never permit this. We have seen human-Daleks on two occasions (Evil of the Daleks and The Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks, and both times the Daleks destroyed them.