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@tardigrade  I didn’t care for the Doctor shooting the general, without really much necessity- forcing a regeneration is not a minor thing and seemed significantly out of character for the Doctor. Really just seemed to be thrown in to allow the gender change.

I thought the shooting was a way to show that yes, the Doctor really was prepared to commit serious mayhem on Gallifrey (“I’m just getting started”).  It was a shock, though.  Fortunately safeguarding Clara came first, and she got him re-focused.  More about that, maybe, after re-watch.

@janetteb  the shooting demonstrated just how “out of the character” the Doctor was. He is breaking all of his own rules. He is deeply traumatised and angry. He is not “the Doctor”. When he picks up the velvet coat at the end it signifies that he is healed. He is taking back on the mantle of Doctor and all that goes with the name/title.

Yes — and that includes what he’s learned from traveling with Clara about sticking with his own rules, whether he actually remembers Clara (in one way or another) or not.  But I’m still having a nitpicky problem with that burgundy coat that seems to travel a bit on its own, at least in Hell Bent.

Writing a Doctor Who script to fit a season arc must be a bit like *being* the Doctor — all that data amassed from all the previous seasons, and the job is to manage to keep all of it accessible while still picking out the signal — the bits that enhance the story you’re working on and secure it to the whole business — from the general noise.  And what’s signal and what’s noise changes with the shape of each season’s arcs.

Hmm.  I picture the Doctor (some time in S10, perhaps) looking for something in the Tardis console and coming upon those cue cards . . .

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@puroandson  Son of puro — I thought, after Heaven Sent, that the most satisfying end for Clara would be the raven death (or something like it).  But I’ve changed my mind about that, and I agree, it’s better in emotional terms for the viewers and in story terms for the characters for her to “graduate” to a “rest-of-your-life” full of heroic and exhilarating adventure — she turns true to her original nature, and “Impossible Woman” with Time Lord goals but a human spirit, living whatever time she has between one heartbeat and the final one ripped from her by the Raven, who knows when!  (We’re all pretty much in that boat anyway just living normal lives, so it’s not a punishment, just life.)  I also like that she gets to share it with Ashildr, who managed pretty well with an open ended future but stuck on Earth.  She also deserves release onto a wider stage to explore.  I’d send snow if I could, but you know how it is . . .

I’m about to do my first re-watch (I caught the show Sat. night on tv in my hotel in Oregon — full of ads, of course), to see what I can see and test some of these theories about who knew what when etc. and what everybody’s intentions were.  Wonder how people will come to view these issues after re-watching over time.  The Xmas thing doesn’t play into it, since it’s described as happening back when River was still alive.

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@pedant  Everything in the last few minutes shows Clara’s absolutely desolation and heartache as she gets confirmation that the plan had worked, if not as intended then as expected (the purpose of the diner scenario being to run that test). The close-up acting (sorry, don’t know the technical term) by Jenna was stunning and screamed this, and it was slammed home like a an express train hitting the buffers as she turned away, unable to face him lest he work it out.  And then she gave what comfort she could. Because, basically, Clara rocks.

This works too — beautifully.  It was my first reaction and ties in with Moffat’s claim to be writing more plots and  motivations than ones the more imaginative fans think up.  The emotional pay-off of this approach is massive, as you say.  But when you’ve absorbed all of that that you can, there are these other possibilities, which can also work (the Doctor planned the whole thing or most of it, he and Clara worked it up between them, etc.) because DW fans tend to be very smart and creative with these stories, and the writing under Moffat’s leadership, plus the splendid acting teams’ talents, open up the stories to fantastic creativity in fans and others.

@puroandson  . . . we already have a true and logical resolution: she’s out and about with all memories intact finally able to step (almost) into the Doctor’s shoes. Her companion won’t run off, they have an OK knowledge of the Tardis and the hybrid is released from torment and from duty of care. I think it’s logical already and whilst Clara and her mate may sign up for radio plays I don’t think we’ll see her or Ashildr again -maybe Ashildr will reappear briefly but then the question will dangle in our heads where is Clara? That chapter is now over. Just as Rory and Amy ‘s chapter is over.

I really like the idea of the Doctor freed to move on, with possible call-backs in the future to S8-S9 if there’s an irresistably good place for that to happen.

Heaven Sent/Hell Bent is turning out, the more we talk about it, to be a deeply satisfying ending for this TARDIS team, for me.  A large part of the satisfaction is this multiple-level interpretability.  But I like fluidity and open-endedness in fiction in general, rather than nailing everything down once and for all.  Time moves on.  There is no once and for all.

 

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@mudlark  This: . . .  all the oblique and coded references in their conversation and their body language left me with a strong feeling, if not certainty, that the Doctor and Clara had reached a mutual, if unspoken understanding. When they parted he knew perfectly well who she was, even though she was no longer ‘in his mind’ and his memories of her in his past were more like a story told, and she knew that he knew; and they were content in that knowledge. So he reads her last message to him on the chalk board, picks up his ‘doctorish’ coat, and is ready to embark on the next phase of his life.

@pedant  Or this:. . .  he recognises that she existed because of the hole left by her. There is a person-shaped void in his memory. He sees the absence, but cannot recall the exact person who filled. All he has is a song, as Clara hinted at the end – she is a song call Clara, so she is still a story, in the end. And I’m pretty sure that’s the idea she seeded in the Matrix. They had become a gestalt entity. Both knew what was coming, even if the details weren’t yet clear, and she made sure he wasn’t left totally bereft, a last act of devotion.

These ideas make me happy (without in any way tainting all the sadness).  On the other hand, there’s a clip of Moffat in which he says something like, “I’m much more direct in my thinking than people realize [so my reasoning about these stories is simpler than the ideas that the fans come up with].”  He’s also supposed to have said someplace that he works to make every DW episode understandable to his own kids (early teens I think), and feel sure that that effort, at least, is made in good faith.

I would love to see SM write a book about his years of experience running and writing DW after he turns over the job to someone else.  It would be a huge, amazing, joke if it were to turn out that he was writing pretty straightforward stuff all along, but between the subtleties of performance and the chaotic speculations of the fans, a whole magnificent (and largely imaginary) palace of palaces has arisen on basically simple narrative frameworks  provided by him and his writers.

But Moffat lies . . .

@tommo  raid the forums for ideas? why the hell not?

Better yet — have ideas run past this forum (incognito, of course) for one among several types of audience reaction — and for people to poke holes in.  Not that they’d really do that.  Their job is tough enough as it is.

@nerys  (Of Ashildr remembering Raven events)  he probably wrote it down into a beautiful story, and she remembers the pain and beauty of it because she captured that in her story. Kind of like the Doctor transposing Clara into a lovely melody.

Even though Ashildr may have given up writing her journals over the course of time (how the hell could she carry that huge library around with her?!), she might well revert to recording events for the ending of this story of Clara and the Doctor, in which she herself was so instrumental.

And thanks, wiping the Doctor’s memory (or seeming to, or only doing it partially) seemed like the best way out from a while back.  In any event, he gets the song; she goes on to shape the legend of ThelmAshildr and Clara-louise — intergalactic folklore . . .

@axelpond  So, stories are forgotten memories. Yes? And we are all stories in the end, just make it a good one, ey? Is the Doctor telling us that we all will be forgotten?

Yes; and we will.  Our own planet keeps yielding up traces of entire human cultures that have been turned into stories and/or forgotten (see the 20th c archaeological discovery of Old Europe in Bulgaria etc., or the massive stone structures in Turkey with animals carved on them).  It’s only in our own visions of ourselves that we are more than mayflies.  (Except that we possibly/probably are more, if there’s a conscious existence after death.)

@bluesqueakpip  #48989  this post is, IMO, absolutely right on.  When your dad says, “I love you and I promise I won’t let anything happen to you”, that’s a) a lie — he can’t deliver on the promise, and b) if he *could* do that he would be doing you the greatest injury — stopping you from finding the experiences you need to find to continue maturing as an autonomous individual — a young adult, as it were.  But very, very old . . .

@avaris  There is a long pause before the line of “better than a coin toss”. This is the point the Doctor decides to erase his memory of Clara. The Doctor can simply hold it backwards to use the neuron block on himself or change to human non-compatible (the doctor can think of something clever.).

That was going to be my next question to ponder — if he *does* plan the memory wipe, at what point does he choose wiping his own memory (fully or partially) instead of hers?  I like your answer: it’s the “last resort” that his brilliant brain can come up with, and he launches into it in typical Doctor-fashion — no whining, no flinching, just get on with it.  Great take on the positive outcomes of Clara’s raven-death, too — wow.  So many really smart and thoughtful people on this forum — it’s a privilege to know yez.

@morpho  My feeling was that the Doctor knew Clara would be listening in on his conversation with Me as well. The last test in How to Be a Doctor?

and

@lisa  I totally believe the Doctor set this up for it to shake out this way. Really do!  Now they both can continue on. He doesnt feel the ‘obsession’ any more. He purged himself of that part. And Clara and Me as Thelma and Louise driving over cliffs! Me gets the adrenaline rush thing from the Mire and Clara came out of the Doctors time stream tainted with Doctor.  She became like him. Including that craving for adventures. IMHO that’s why ‘runners’ run.  So glad that at the end Clara wrote on the chalkboard (SM added) the message – ‘RUN you clever boy’ AND ‘ be the DOCTOR’ .  Yes! He totally remembers her.

From that angle, choosing his own “amnesia” via Clara’s use of the blocker echoes what he did (or claimed to do) in his confrontation with Davros — suss out the lay of the land and outplay others by using their strengths to move them where he needs them to go.  In this case, he gets an intolerable situation resolved so he can walk — not run — away from it without leaving wreckage behind for others to clean up (Ashildr, after all, has places to go now, “people” to see).  The solution is for him to voluntarily abolish his own powerful addiction — to the company of his beloved other half, his space-child, his Clara.  Together, they sever their “hybrid” bond.

@bluesqueakpip  On the other hand, #48995, (the Doctor does *not* engineer this outcome but is drawn into it as the upshot of his own arrogance) makes just as perfect, satisfying sense to me as the more elaborate “he set it up himself” or “they both worked it out through their mutual understanding” scenarios.

Brilliant (with some dodgy, blurry bits); just brilliant.  Either way, I’ll take it.

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@mudlark  I got the impression that even when he first walked into the place he had some subliminal awareness of its significance, else why did he start picking out Clara’s theme and launch into his narrative? And then, at the end, he played the theme in full, which again I think is significant. And then he sees the diner dematerialise around him, and the portrait of Clara on his Tardis. What could be plainer?

That’s pretty convincing, and would put a somewhat different spin on his final scene, inside the TARDIS, seeing the chalkboard writing and putting on the coat, all without a word.  What does he know?  What has he truly forgotten or lost, and what, exactly, does he still remember?

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@bluesqueskpip  Love your post #48897, above — great.  This:  it’s the Doctor who thinks he’s playing the starring role in a tragedy. However, the universe – in the person of the current producer – knows he’s playing the starring role in a comedy.

And this:  When we see Face The Raven in hindsight, as the ‘regeneration’ story of Clara into Doctor Clara, it makes more sense (the Doctor’s regenerations often occur through sheer bad luck).  Clara’s death is, as the Time Lords know, a fixed point. But what they didn’t realise is why. It’s a fixed point because, without that death, Clara can’t become the human equivalent of a Time Lord.

@pedant  What was described was not a prophecy, drawn from rune casting or tarot, but a forecast made by technology and algorithms.  They weren’t being superstitious. They were scared.

Forgot all about that — thanks for reminder!

@tardigrade  having her return voluntarily to face the raven would have been an eminently appropriate conclusion IMO.

But she *is* returning voluntarily to face the Raven, just taking the long way round.  Oh, and glad to hear that Capaldi has won you over!  So good to enjoy his talents and his zest for this role while we’ve got him, since it won’t be forever and the future of DW itself is always in question.

@nerys  his memory of all that happened is still there. So I don’t think for a moment that he failed to learn from this. I believe he has learned.

Now I’ll have to go watch that again — I completely missed that: he tells her the story, so clearly he *does* remember the events themselves, and that this person he can’t remember was involved in them.   But how much can he have learned without knowing why he acted as he did — that his motives were so often about Clara?  Still thinking that over . . .

@jphamlore  I don’t agree that Clara’s death was due to “bad luck.” I think what is being portrayed is that the Doctor and Clara are in a “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” relationship, which is why it had to be broken by one of them forgetting about the other.

I agree — it had evolved into that kind of impossible situation; and this time it’s only fair that it’s the Doctor who gives up his memories, not the companion.

@lisa  He figured out that he had to part from Clara. So was he making it easier for her? Seems to me that he really didn’t loose a lot of his memory. I really get that feeling. The Doctor lies. Again.

Oh, lisa — well-spotted!  So do you think he was at least partially play-acting having forgotten Clara in those conversations in the diner?!  That would be a new level of lies, even for him!  Gotta look again.

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@avaris  I think Clara can only die when she goes back to the fixed point in Face the Raven. I am not sure if it is fixed anymore. Only Twelve witness Clara’s Death, yet Twelve forgets about Clara.

An excellent point — thank you!  If a tree falls in the forest and only the Doctor sees it happen — ?

@puroandson  Son of puro, Her death is waiting. To me the loss of the Doctor’s memories of her is a “fate worse than death”

Except, I think, that the one *worse* thing would be for her to lose her own memories of her time with the Doctor; so it’s got to be a consolation to her that she is now in possession of memories, as seen from her side at least, of traveling with him.  I also like it that somebody else here pointed out that just as the Impossible Girl did with SmithDoc, Clara has once again saved the Doctor many times, but when he looks back at those years he won’t see her as part of the action (his mind will paper over the missing bits, as minds do), so she’ll still be saving him without him noticing . . . !

@nerys  Who is the poster who predicted it would be the Doctor forgetting Clara? Bravo! You must be feeling quite chuffed about that.

Yes!  That was me, and pedant, I believe.  It just seemed like potentially the most poignant outcome and a nice bit of turnabout as well.

@mudlark  She has lost the Doctor, except in memory, but she no longer needs his presence, since she can continue, Doctor-like, to experience the adventures which had come to be her chief reason for being. To me that seems a fitting way to round off her tale, and not the anti-climax that a literal resurrection would have been.

Precisely.  She’s rewarded for her courage and tenacity, not punished after all by that misogynist old meanie, Moffat (as some noodle-brains were complaining on reddit, I think).  Loved this whole post of yours, above.

But when he leaves in the Tardis, the last we see of it is Rigsy’s painted memorial with the portrait of Clara flaking away, and the fragments scattered to the winds.

*Damn*, don’t remind me — that image hit hard, very hard.   He said he could hardly wait to see what Rigsy’s next piece of art would do — now he sees, but how much does he know?  Are you saying that he *does* remember Clara, in the diner scene, prompted maybe by their conversation?  So then when he enters the TARDIS and puts on his claret coat and squares up to stepping away from the past and into the future, does he remember consciously that the claret coat was Clara’s favorite?

Also I hadn’t caught the significance of his exiling not just Rassilon but the whole High Council as a revolutionary move designed to leave Gallifrey in the hands of its ordinary people.  Fastest revolution in history!   I though he was just repaying the lot of them for complicity in the events of Raven and Heaven, but I like the idea of the rebel Time Lord being so effective that he can overturn them just by showing up!  This also frees him to turn his back and go off and have non-Gallifrey adventures, which I think is another brilliant stroke by Moffat — we all know the Doctor makes a terrible President of anything, so it’s best anyway to leave the commoners to reconstruct their world without him sticking around.

Are we sure this is Gallifrey 4 billion years on, though?  If the Confession Dial experience was largely subjective, then maybe not?

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@pedant post #48765 — yes yes to all of it!  Wonderful stuff.  And:

“. . . the Hybrid there was still no suitable explanation” — There was a perfectly clear (not sure what suitable means in this context) explanation: the gestalt entity that is Doctor+Clara.

A gestalt that has now been wrenched apart, so that each one can get on with their separate lives, one keeping the memories that she rightly claims belong to her, that she’s won with her courage and her quickness; the other with only faint echoes of someone gone, but also (IMO) past the huge obstacles of guilt and grief that he burned and crashed his way through in “Heaven Sent” so he can continue his life.  I don’t think any of those lost events can ever be reclaimed or reconstructed, because the root cause — Clara — has been erased from his mind.  It would be a bit like waking from a dream, with some tendrils of memory melting away as you turn your attention to them, leaving you with blurred outlines of people and actions but no identifying details of who occupied that “outline” that the missing person left.

Oh, and I have to point out that I called it too, somewhere up the spoilers thread, thinking that someone might obliterate Clara from the Doctor’s memory as a mercy to him (I mentioned Ohila, or maybe Missy — though she and mercy don’t mix) fixing him up so that he can move forward, free and clear, from the awful moments of Clara’s death (and leaving only us, the fans, to remember for him). What tipped me off was the bit of the trailer where he was asked the name of the song he was playing:”I think it’s called ‘Clara’.”  (Though I thought it was Rigsy asking him that, for some reason.)

I need to re-watch to see if there are signs that the Doctor does indeed set things up deliberately to destroy his memories of her rather than vice versa, releasing both of them.  He’s that clever, all right, but is he that perceptive?

Him not remembering Clara I find sad, but sadder still was the thought of *us* remembering when he doesn’t; and worst of all, that before long he won’t even remember that he doesn’t remember a chunk of his life that was so passionately significant to them both.  It’s the losing that gets me, more than the loss itself.  Kept me up most of Saturday night after the show, with a weird, tense discomfort in my midsection.  Come to think of it, we *need* Clara to survive to do any remembering that needs to be done in future DW stories — and more importantly, to make this something much better than the “it was only a dream” sort of ending that it could be otherwise.

 

 

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@puroandson  . . . there’s a transition ‘space’ of memory -and so his ‘time’ in the confessional might well exist in some inexplicable ‘measure’: something to be remembered should he wish to, or to file away in his ‘mind palace’ for another day. . . . We can agree that had he really lived through this almost eternal hell, then of course nothing of the orginal landscape would remain: the lillies, the picture of Clara, the table

More evidence that this all “happened” (probably) in the time it took for the teleport cuff to move him from the trap street to Gallifrey, and that could be very short time indeed, in the Who universe.  It’s a loop that runs continually, overlapping slightly at the end each time so that the bird story can unfold, and eventually he breaks out of the loop and into reality (I hope!).

So the re-set also includes a re-set of the configuration of stars he can see overhead, although in fact (IMO) only a very short time has passed outside his prison.

Puro, thank you for that narrative.  I’m packing up for a weekend trip so I can’t respond at length here, but I do appreciate it as a way to cast a different light on the time issue from a place of (relative, you being human and the Doctor being what he is) experience.

A question, though — he enters the Dial in his burgundy coat, and wears it throughout.  He steps out of the Dial onto Gallifrey in his dark blue coat.  ???

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@countscarlioni  . . . in BG Who, there was a strong emphasis on tight stories. In AG Who, there is far less concern for tight stories and much more emphasis on the dramatic flourish or the thing’  . . . I’ve come to think this is particularly true for SM and that he just does not sweat what seem to him to be relatively minor plot points or even sometimes quite big ones. . . come at the final episode from a different place, not worry about tight story logic, and to see thebig picture’ and ignore the smaller stuff as SM won’t dot all of his i’s and cross all of his t’s anyway. That’s what we do for him in the week after the episode.

What you said, exactly.  The change in emphasis is what has many older fans so annoyed and disgusted: they’re looking for the same thing as before.  But I think SM saw that that’s a good way to run out of stories, after so long, so why not go more for the metaphorical, the personal drama, the deeper connections?  I left because of the first approach, have come back been riveted because of the second.  I think SM is doing a bang-up job with it.

@spacedmunkee  I’ve watched Heaven Sent 3 times now. On each rewatch I thought I might get impatient and forward to the end but I didn’t. Each time I was drawn into the story and the puzzle that the Doctor has to solve.

The thing I can’t get over is that, after three times, the whole thing is over so *fast* — it starts on tiptoe, and then it just roars along and zooms to a close.

At first the Doctor had barely started the story before dying but as he chipped away at the wall, the veil had slightly further to walk to reach him. Every step the doctor made through the wall enabled a little more of the shepherd boy’s story to be revealed.

Damn!  Thank you!  I completely missed that, was wondering how come he had more time to tell it near the end . . . again, the power of stories . . .

Just all of *what* does he mean he remember?  Hasn’t just realized that he’s been doing this misery for 7000 yrs?  And he’s protesting that he doesn’t want to do it again (and again and again) because he knows how horrible it is each time?

And yes to everyone about the loving care that’s clearly gone into the visual and thematic aesthetics of the thing — it’s amazing.

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As to “HOME”, I’m not worried about it since I see the whole event as subjective, so when his subconscious says it’s time, it supplies the final bit of motivation with a word that suddenly appears on the wall and then fades out.  I don’t see any other way that can work, actually — I have my doubts that super-diamond is something that could be “programmed” to do that, but the mind can do whatever it wants to with its own creations.

Wasn’t the Dial partially open when we saw it in Missy’s hands?  Which indicates that it’s not the original one prepared by the Doctor, since the thing is only supposed to open when he’s dead — and he’s not dead during tWF.  He’s at a party.  So the thing shouldn’t actually ever be seen even partially open, as the Doctor only “dies” while he’s inside it, in Heaven Sent.

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@morpho  He buried it in the garden with I AM IN 12 written on it, didn’t he? As you do. XD

Must remember that next time . . . !  Thanks — I didn’t catch that the thing buried in the garden was a stone thing, thought if was a coffin top or something else wooden.  As is not uncommon, expectation obscured reality.

@blenkinsopthebrave  OK, off to read the eight pages of comments–yikes! And maybe a glass of wine. No…definitely a glass of wine. Or two. Or…

Too late, blenks — I drank it all, during a re-watch . . . self-medication, you know.

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@countscarlioni  on the hybrid: It appears the Doctor truly believes he is the hybrid, but that does not necessarily mean that he’s right. Or perhaps there can be more than one hybrid. It might not be either/or.

Excellent point — he’s been wrong before, after all.

@jphamlore  Not only that but for just this one episode, that the Doctor’s pockets are bigger on the inside than the outside seems to have been completely forgotten

Maybe for this episode his pockets have been sewn shut.  Seriously though, this episode doesn’t need the kind of coherence people normally look for.  It’s either designed by Missy (and swapped for the real Dial), or set up by the Doctor and tampered with to work the way it does.  So details are less important than making sure that the basic elements are in place and functional to serve the exact purpose, which is clearly *not* being his Will, as he apparently had prepared it to be.  For one thing, it operates at full bore, and then releases him alive on Gallifrey — whereas Missy described it as something that would only open after his death.  Of course, that’s Missy talking . . .

@tardigrade  A major point of the dial was to keep him occupied for geological ages, and by giving him something to rail against, they could guarantee that. I don’t think he “beat” the confession dial- he simply did exactly what was anticipated of him.

Only if the passage of time was objective; it’s not, IMO, but purely subjective instead.  He breaks through the diamond wall and emerges unaged, unmarked and unbloodied, except of course mentally scourged to death and beyond.  I’m betting smoke and mirrors, + his own precarious mental balance immediately following Clara’s death. Someone arranged for him one Hell of a psychotic break, which he embraced for his own purposes — expiation and the discharge of what would otherwise have been a potentially paralyzing wall a grief he might never have been able to punch through.  (well, not for a long time — this is the Doctor, and time is something he has oodles of.)

Of course, a bonkers idea is that he set this up for himself somehow, to get past all that and clear his mind for the execution of a supernova of revenge . . .

@mirime  I now get the missing flagstone and where it went

Whoah!  Enlighten, please — I haven’t a clue, myself.

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@pedant  He has always said that his kids need to be able to understand Who. He has been consistent about that . . .  Few modern TV writers understand the meta as well as Moffat. There is always the risk that it becomes a bit too knowing and inward-looking, but on the whole he manages to stay on the right side of the line.
Unlike the dickhead who thought he could school JK Rowling.

And here’s another one:

http://www.kasterborous.com/2015/11/everything-time-everything-dies/

Good (Time) Lord!  Talk about torturing yourself!  At least CapDoc had compelling reasons to stagger his way through Hell.  This fool should have left off years ago, but no, gotta poison the well for everybody else (except the rest of the gripers who would also do themselves a favor and go find something they like better to watch, for gods’s sake).  I’ve outgrown DW a couple of times in the past and left it, dipped back in to see if it was more to my taste, back now for — well, probably as long as we’ve got CapDoc, but who knows?  In this guy’s case, I think DW has outgrown *him*.  Sad.  It’s not a religion; they don’t excummunicate you if you leave.

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@tardigrade  It occurred to me that the Doctor’s time in the confession dial could be seen as a possible fulfilment of the hybrid prophecy. He’s destroyed a billion hearts (actually more like a trillion), it’s just that instead of it being a genocide, it was suicide – he’s been knocking them off two at a time and they were all his own. And, as widely discussed, the process may have brought penance / catharsis for the loss of Clara, healing his own heart(s). And of course he’s standing in the ruins of Gallifrey.

Brilliant!  Except his hearts when he steps out of the Dial are not healed — far from it, if he’s more or less become the Raven, but on sky-blackening scale for Gallifrey . . .

@whisht  are we* all agreed it was Judgement this week?

@juniperfish   personally I think it’s the Tower – the castle in the ocean in which the Doctor is imprisoned for billions of his subjective years. I think the Judgement card is yet to come. But the World card, is definitely Gallifrey. We still have the Lovers card to come too.

Can’t decide between these possibilities

could have a whole series which is the Doctor’s own Alice in Wonderland journey, with various aliens along the way which recall the Cheshire Cat and the March Hare and the Hookah smoking caterpillar and the Red and White Queens. Are you writing this down, Moff?

That could be great fun — and I suspect that fun is definitely on the table for S10 (after all this glorious catastrophe ending S9).  (Well; unless he allows Clara to guide him, one last time, away from vengeance and toward — what?!)

 

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@pedant  Love “fansplaining”!

And just something from that latest Radio Times Moffat interview, here’s the beginning of an answer to a question about making a flow chart for writing an episode to keep it all straight:

The chart would be worse than the script. Most of my stuff is much simpler than people credit it for being.

In other words — he’s claiming that he leaves the bonkerizing to us.  Makes me wish he were part of the gang here, actually bonkerizing himself along with the rest of us — now, that would be something to see!

But — does he really believe what he said?  Do we?

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@josh  It would be a great excuse for one more scene with Clara and Capaldi through the crack in the universe.

Not sure I could take it . . . nah!  I’d love it!  Show us how far the Doctor has come, in mental setting-to-rights, since Face the Raven (several billion subjective years at least . . . oughta be good for something).

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@nerys  I watched it a third time last night. I think this episode suffers from commercial interruptions even more than most

Absolutely.  Most watchers are probably seeing this weirdly mutilated form of the show — no wonder some of them can’t get past “how does the first suit of clothes get there?” etc.!  I shelled out $ this year to get the episodes as they’re shown from iTunes, still can’t keep away from watching the night before with the ads, and it’s always upsetting to see how awful that is.

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@mudlark  his/her schemes never less than grandiose in their ambition, though inevitably containing an essential flaw 

Yes — the flaw often being the Doctor!  If she can get rid of all the TLs *and* keep the Doctor crazed, then all her other plans might well work out (s/he might think).

I suspect that if he had given up or otherwise failed his mind would have . . . ceased to exist except as a record on a hard drive. His body would have remained in potentia on the threshold of the teleporter, never to be reconstituted and ultimately to be deleted from the teleporter hard drive.

Gawd.  *That* idea just gave me the shivers . . .

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@lisa  I can imagine we are the future Galifreyans too

LOL!  I think we’re them *now* — our leadership is, anyway: buried in technology, trying to control everything, and acting like total dicks half the time (more than half, in fact).

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@jphamlore  In my opinion, the confession dial follows a strategy of Steven Moffat to deliberately rewrite parts of the classic series, a precedent so that his successors can also make each run as showrunner their own.

What a lovely, generous idea . . .

@swordwhale  Love the conversations with Clara, how she is always back turned, sort of a strange “spirit visitation” or memory, wonderfully eerie until that last scene with her.

That last bit, when he actually sees her — it’s like, “Keep going, don’t quit — you’ve won your way this far, here’s a bit of a reward beforehand — look, see me — now, go and win!”  I recall a winter day in Venice (speaking of complicated puzzle boxes!) when a tall thin African man walked quickly past, huddled against the cold, and I heard him mutter under his breath, “Corragio, Mustapha!”  The Doctor is lucky enough (!) to have his lost companion to encourage him; so good.

@arbutus  he wouldn’t have to do everything exactly the same way each time, as long he made it back to the teleport room and completed the cycle there. That solves a lot of dilemmas. It is also borne out by the fact that the story he tells the Veil changes from time to time; so we know that he is not repeating events in exactly the same way.

Ooh, yes — It has to be a bit different each time, and we got our clues to this (“seven thousand years,” he says.  “Two billion years”), as he did.  It increases the horror of it, that becomes as aware of this as we are (as he must, for him to be able to progress a little further now and then before dying).  I wonder how long it took him to realize he didn’t *need* to set that tipped over boot straight in front of the fire for an adequately accurate repeat next time.

You think the time-passage is objectively real — make the Doctor two billion years and a bit old at the end?!  Whoo.  I have trouble with that.  I’ll stick with it being entirely subjective, occupying exactly the time it takes for the teleport thing to get him from the trap street to Gallifrey — until we know *when* he’s arrived there, definitely an open question if we get, as Moffat promised, something about how he showed up at the big battle to make up “all 13!”

@puroandson  the Zygon Inversion where he states off the cuff that Clara is continually in his head was said in a rather poignant if not tart manner of expression -again something that might fail to enthuse fans for various reasons.

It was a wry comment, I agree.  Have any of them noticed that, as far as you know?  As you said, they complain about the size and misplacement of rooms, about the similarity to Hogwart’s castle, about the second set of clothing. 

I wouldn’t worry;  @arbutus is right, the vast majority of fandom (I think) isn’t experienced enough to “get” all of this episode, let alone resonate to it.

“if you ever let her live one day and it led to this….” Yes, I can imagine his mind, mad with grief, rage and guilt, determined to track her [Missy] down

Missy, Ashildr — who else is on his (as yet provisional) hit list now?  He hasn’t forgotten Missy’s attempt to lure him into killing the Dalek-suited Clara, I think we can depend on that.

Son of Puro  If he has two hearts isn’t the agony of endurance twice as bad? If any part of us feels emotional because of even five minutes of that episode then I think Mr Moffat succeeded.

Two hearts for sufficient pain, two hearts for sufficient courage, yes.  Moffat succeeded all right.

@mudlark  I am not comfortable with the idea of penance to expiate the guilt he feels for his failure to protect Clara, especially such a protracted penance. I think, rather, that he feels persistence and ultimate survival are what he owes her, who has so often prompted him to live up to his name and be his better self.

Another great way to look at it — thanks!

I suspect that it would be Missy’s idea, with her as the driving force and Ashildr/Me acting at her instigation.

Good grief — if this is Missy’s doing, what is she after?  She has made him quite capable now of being the one who “stands in the ruins of Gallifrey and destroys a billion hearts . . . ”  Is she after obliterating the TLs once and for all, so that only she and the Doctor will remain, to travel together at last, each as crazy as the other?!

@josh  sorry for the long post

Welcome, Josh, but as for your post being long enough to apologize for — gads, look around!  There’s a ton of energy roaring around this place after Heaven Sent, and we can’t get everything out there fast enough!

@brewski  he is half Time Lord half TARDIS.

That does it; you win the internet today!

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@jphamlore Wouldn’t the Time Lords or in particular Omega have noticed a half-human half-Time Lord DNA hybrid in this biodata extract?

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?  This is going to be *very* interesting.  It’s also going to be the plot-heavy complement to Heaven Sent, since there are lots of loose ends to be tied up (of course they won’t have tied them *all* up, but certainly some major ones).  We’ve had our emotional devastation and recovery (of a sort).  Now we get some explanations and resolutions.

Which also means that viewers who love emotional, character-driven work most probably will feel let down by Hell Bent, while those who love plot-intricacies and long-game story-arcs will be — well, let down, probably, since they seem to be get really hung up on inconsistent mechanical and timing details of narrative, so stories are more easily spoiled for them.  The actors are great, so the emotional and psychological lines almost always work, but I don’t think anyone but a TL could catch every hitch in the objective plot line after 52 years of events (and that’s omitting peripheral material like Big Finish, novels, comic books etc.).

IOW, I am happy with my own status as a sentimentalist . . . but think I’ll pay for it next week.  I don’t mind.  I’ll always have seasons 8 and 9, whatever comes after.  I’m building them into my ramshackle wreck of a memory palace . . .

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@jphamlore  If the Doctor gave up all his answers, the Time Lords would be able to use the confession dial to get back to this universe. And that I believe the Doctor is willing to do anything to prevent . . . I suspect that the Doctor will revisit the events of The Day of the Doctor when he reappeared with the other 12 Doctors and add his input to their calculations. Only he is going to randomize his input and throw it away so that Gallifrey can never be found. Gallifrey falls no more.

I absolutely love this idea, and hope you are right!

@winston  #48382  Your stages make sense to me, especially Acceptance — he would need to shift his attention from trying to cope with his inner turmoil to purposeful action, to focus on his revenge, and I think for that, he’d need to feed his revenge with the finality of her death — burning his emotions this time to get a Hell Raining Down result, as he burned his body to re-set the Dial events.

@arbutus  . . . the Time Lords, knowing his cleverness and determination, must have known that he would find a way to survive. And yet, how can they have believed that he would torture himself so horribly, simply to survive with his secret intact? It’s beyond imagining.

I don’t think it’s that simple, though, and the TLs wouldn’t understand enough to foresee his reaction.  Keeping the secret is, IMO, a hook to hang the reality on: his deeper, subconscious (?) motive.  He’s accepting what he feels is just punishment for Clara’s death; and it’s hardly enough, because he needs absolute *masses* of expiation if he’s to move beyond the enormity that she’s gone for good — because of him, however indirectly.  He fell into a trap that had been set for him (surely he should have caught this earlier, what with that piano-sized brain and all!) and which also, accidentally, killed her.  He’s the one who trust Ashildr’s promise of protection as stated, though it turned out to be conditional.  Clara was only in the Trap Street because he was there, and because his influence on her over so long a period had made her eager to help Rigsy (her own “companion” in Flatline), not to mention confident in her own quick judgments and ability to accomplish Doctor-like tasks and come out all right herself.

“This is my fault,” he says in Face the Raven.  I think he believes that and feels that there can’t be too much punishment for it — not in however many billion years it takes for him to punch through a wall of diamond with his bare fist.  Subjectively, when the Clara-in-his-head urges him to get on with it she’s giving him the go-ahead, assuring him that this will be enough.  This horrifying ordeal of repeated suicide can take the place of objective self-destruction, discharging his self-imposed sentence.

In this respect, Heaven Sent is a heart-wrenching demonstration of how much she, and her death, means to 12 — and also a way for him to get through all the grieving he needs to do without taking 2 billion objective years to do it. He needs to drive through it as hard as he can, to be fully focused on revenge when the time comes — focused on it enough to not be held back by Clara’s command to be a healer, not a killer.

Well, we’ll see about that . . . !  Next weekend.

 

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@juniperfish  #48303  thanks for the link to the artist’s page on tumblr; a beautiful piece, IMO, so thanks for that too, @serahni.

@puroandson  #48296 (I’m trying to catch up here, using post numbers) Both of you — “fixity of purpose”, yes.  Perfect.

@mudlark  #38304  This is a great summary of the situation.  The Dial could be of the Doctor’s own making and could originally had different contents, but it’s been tampered with to change it from a Will to an interrogation device.

The environment may not have been objectively real, but it was designed to register realistic and internally consistent evidence of the passage of time in a way which he would notice.

This is crucial, I think: it’s obviously *not* objectively real (how would they have shrunk the Doctor down to a size at which he’d fit inside the thing?  Lots of skulls but no other bones from the dead Doctors’ skeleton? etc.), and the mechanical faults that some fans are all in a tizzy over (I mean about timing, some rooms re-setting and others not, etc.) are simply immaterial — it’s *all* subjective, in the Doctor’s mind (which is being used against him at the moment), IMO.  Nothing has happened in reality except that he has been transported to Gallifrey while being forced to imagine an almost endless repetition of a truly awful session of torture and suicide.

@ozitenor  during the great sequence at the end when CapDoc dies over and over again pecking away at the diamond, although my son said nothing nor made a whimper, I turned to look at his face and a single furtive tear was falling from his eye. Seeing this kind of empathy from my boys fulfill me more than I imagined it ever could. Una furtiva lagrima.

I am so glad you got back here to bring us that: thank you.

 

 

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Endings for the final episode that I’d like to see:

A quiet visit to the diner, just a gesture (there’s already been that bit from the trailer where his vision of Clara as his in-head/in-Tardis companion [Hell Bent] takes his hands and then they let go for good at last).  He noodles a song on the guitar, she smiles.  He leaves something on the table with the tip — a symbolic whatnot, though it wouldn’t mean anything to an echo from before Clara ever met the Doctor, would it?  While she clears up, just living her waitress life, from outside we hear the whooshing of the Tardis departing.

Or: a shot of the Doctor on the shingle from near the end of MotOE, sitting on a timber, or whatever it was the two of them sat on side by side but not touching.  He looks out across the water toward the modernistic structures over there; but he’s sitting alone.  After a bit, he gets up, puts his hands in his pockets, and walks away down the empty beach.

I’m easily satisfied, really; I like modest hints over hooplah for sad moments.  And I really hate to see this wonderful series of series, traveling with mercurial and strong-minded Clara, come to an end.  Viscerally, I mean: I hate to let it go (speaking of letting things go).  The emotional anchor of their tumultuous and stressful, but strong bond worked wonders, IMO.  I can’t even imagine what can follow next year.

Maybe a puppy . . .

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@arbutus  Thanks!  I think it’s clever way to get an appropriate mourning period for Clara over very fast so the story can move on and conclude.  And Moffat is nothing if not clever . . .

 

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@ericam  Did anyone else think it was incredibly sad that the doctor died like a million times.

Yes, it was.  I guess you could think of it as an extreme distraction from being wrecked by Clara’s death . . . Also it’s Moffat getting him primed with anger for next time.  The Doctor is sensitive sometimes, but also very tough.  This is definitely the moment to put the pressure on, if you want him to even consider standing destroying “a billion hearts to heal his own.”  After all, Clara told him to heal himself, but not like that!

And that doesn’t sound like the Valeyard to me, I must say, since that’s supposed to be all the worst of him rolled up into one.  This is about revenge against whoever set the Trap Street trap, which could be a small circle of top-rank TLs, not all of Gallifrey.  His rage is very focused, not (so far as I’m aware) a general lashing out at all and sundry.

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@puroandson  I think the Doctor is the hybrid and not ‘me’ – that was pretty certain but in re-watching he speaks on the tower of how the hybrid, in legends, was a “storm which blew in on the wind” -much like The Oncoming Storm mentioned by Tennant et. al. ? So, possibly that might help to settle the question.

“The hybrid will stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and destroy a billion hearts to heal his own.”  To heal *his* own.  I’m thinking its CapDoc, not Ashildr.  He is furious enough to destroy ten billion hearts and half crazed by the Confession Dial, so I think he’s our best bet, though hybrid of TL and what else, exactly, I can’t guess.  over to spoilers, I think.

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Some one earlier (so many great comments!) asked why CapDoc didn’t use the spade on the crystal wall, which would make sense — if he didn’t have to get past the Veil (it was right behind him, remember) to get the spade.  He’d be killed by the Veil and have to remember each time after that to bring the spade with him from the grave-digging scene to room 12.

Anyway, once he’s made up his mind that punching through the diamond mountain is his only way out, he wants to get to it, right now, with his own fists.  I think he knows at some level that he really needs all that fear, desperation, and pain, to expiate his guilt (Clara died on his watch, because she was with him on an adventure that turned out to be a trap for him and incidentally fatal for her) and his grief over Clara’s death.

He *could* perhaps escape the castle run and run from that pain and keep finding it everywhere he pauses for  breath, as he told Clara he would if she were gone back in The Girl Who Died (now “The Girl Who Died is” Clara.  Ow.)

Instead, with the voice of Clara-in-his-head encouraging him, he takes on and confronts the pain by beating his way through the crystal wall over millennia of smashing his hands on it and being killed by the Veil plus the teleporter thing.  By the time (on whatever real or imaginary scale) he’s done, he’s won: he’s beaten the pain into submission, so that it can’t paralyze him or sap energy from his new purpose: revenge.  And he breaks through, onto Gallifrey.

Structurally, this functions beautifully in closing the arc of S9, as it leaves him a) crazed enough, I think, to do terrible things to his enemies; and b) clear-eyed enough to do those things cleverly and effectively, and then, in whatever manner, resolve his own arc and move on.  So Clara’s story is completed, and the Doctor is left free to embark on S10 with (probably) rarely a backward glance, after S9 is over.

It’s a brilliant solution to the problem of properly seeing off a long-time companion who deserves every minute of these last three stories

 

 

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I’ve been thinking of “Heaven Sent” as a classic bull-fight, in which matador and bull are one and the bull is so brave and splendid that in the end, the crowd demands that the he be not just spared but honored.

And I’m no fan of bull fighting, believe me.  Not in this life, anyway.

@countscarlioni  the upward journey of a soul through purgatory, then conjuring up images of the Doctor endlessly crawling up to the teleporter room, `Heaven Sent’ indeed.

Only he finds Hell at the end of purgatory, not Heaven — and then release into whatever Gallifrey is in that coda (more illusion?  Not war blasted Gallifrey, but no restored and rebuilt Gallifrey either, since it’s supposed to have frozen in the pocket universe.  Not Gallifrey 4 billion years in the future, since it seems to be inhabited by Gallifreyans known to the Doctor, long-lived maybe, but 4 billion years?).

Magnificent is right — magnificent both in concept and in execution (though no doubt the nit-pickers are eagerly probing for nits to pick in it even as we speak, and will find some because nothing is perfect, ever, in a universe ruled by change).

Just realized, we’ve watched a character reach his goal at long last not just by enduring a horrible ordeal over and over again, but by repeatedly committing suicide by self-electrocution.  “That’s okay; Hell is just Heaven for bad people.”  Not this one, buddy.  This one is Hell for just one guy, who went into it a good man always doubtful about his own goodness.  What he’s come out as, next time will tell.

I can wait, this time.  I need a while to catch my breath . . . and watch again.

 

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In case it hasn’t been mentioned yet, another excellent review of “Heaven Sent” is here:  http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net

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@jphamlore  I am sure Moffat did not intend this, but with the extreme suffering depicted that the Doctor underwent for billions of years, for me, the Doctor has paid in full for his actions in The Zygon Inversion. Thank you, Steven Moffat.

I’m not sure what you refer to as apparently blameworthy actions by the Doctor in “Inversion”, partly because I’m having trouble thinking back to that episode and remembering it (my brain feels cauterized this morning), but one thing is for sure:  well, two.  The first is that he has also paid, and paid, and paid, for the guilt he must feel over Clara’s death — which means we *don’t* have to have such a struggle through grief and remorse over it again.  He’s done four billion years’ worth. This leaves the Doctor free to go get the bastards who set this up without being distracted (or distracting us) with the driving need for self-punishment.  He’s done it.  Nothing remains but to pay them back: to take on Gallifrey etc.  A brilliant stroke — four billion years of expiation clears the slate for “Hell Bent”, *and* for S10 going in a new direction.

Second, we were just shown what he meant by “I’m coming to find you, and I will never, never stop.”  The Doctor announces this at the beginning of “Heaven Sent”, and then he show us what “never” means (despite faltering, thank gods — “it’s not fair!” — we needed that, too, to keep him “real”).  He is not a man of steel; he’s a man of flesh, blood, and bone who’s afraid of pain and death.  Like us.

@avaris  He knows that climbing back to the teleport room will only brings more pain and suffering which last for eternity, and he still does it as it is the right thing to do. I am just so touched by his choice. (I recalled a speech about tiny differences/choices separate great people(heroes), the ordinary and the villains.) Twelve has just become of my favorite Doctor for his perseverance. There is also a nice parallel between the Doctor and the veil. They simply will not stop.

Thanks, I hadn’t thought about it like this, although I’d say that it’s not the right thing for him to do so much as that it’s the *only* thing he can do in terms of acting (which implies forward movement toward the goal of a resolution and release, one way or another) instead of just suffering.  I note that the “Confession Dial” is not at all what the Doctor explained it as, twice now: his “last Will and Testament”.  Instead, it’s been altered to be an instrument for extracting confessions from its prisoner — not the same thing at all!   Who did this, I wonder . . . we’ll see.

@puroandson  Lion of Puro: thankyou for tagging me. I think more people like you should converse. There’s a lot of “I have a theory. This is it.” Not enough “I liked what you said and why did you say this?”

You’re very welcome.  Part of the problem is time (appropriate, given our subject matter): not enough of it for longer conversations, and so many great posts to keep up with and answer!  I think we get into discussion more once the series is over, and we have a long period in which to chat before S10 starts.  Still, I can try to do better.

@juniperfish  Is it the Valeyard inside the Twelfth Doctor who will seek the annihilation of Gallifrey as revenge, and the Doctor inside the Twelfth Doctor who will, in the end, come to his senses and remember Clara’s dying wish?

I’d say yes, in some sense or other.

@thanos  Moffat could be trying to be a bit too clever clever.

Well, fact is he *is* clever — that’s why this show can be so wonderful.

@janetteb  Afterwards R.3 (the 14 yr old) remarked that it was possibly one of the best episodes ever. Even the far harder to please R.2 was impressed though he did remark on the lack of science.

So glad to hear this!  As for science, that was the completion of the solution: finding an energy source.  Question is, did he use ordinary life energy for this, or also some store of regeneration energy?  I ask because that seemed to be a *lot* of energy, to get those great gears turning.  I think what he said just before each death-by-monster was the “Bird” fairy tale, over and over til he made it to the end.

@juniperfish  I’m sure the confession dial’s purpose wasn’t simply to extract the identity of “the hybrid” from him – but to get the Doctor to “punch through” to Gallifrey (thus giving them an escape hatch back into this universe).

But can they use it?  Or would that immediately start the Time War again, and destroy them via Dalek fleet?  Part of my question is when does the Doctor break through to, or rather into what point in time?  I’d say he escape the Dial into the time immediately after Clara’s death, since all the time he spends inside it is recursive, starting up again over and over as he steps out of the teleporter into the castle room.  Or is it some time specific to Gallifrey itself, existing in its pocket universe and scarcely changed (if at all) from when he put it there (frozen in time — but he’s unfrozen it now)?  I can only go so far with this — I told you: serious timey-wimey breaks my brain.

@brainofmoffat  where the majority of the episode actually took place. Was it inside the confession dial, and the dial was merely simulating the sky (in which case the external time elapsed may have been mere seconds)? Or was it in an actual location and the Doctor came through a portal?

Yep, my major question, too.  I think only a few seconds passed — activity is very rapid inside the brain (so I guess that’s where I think this episode happens), and the Doctor’s brain must be lightning fast to cover all that grand-piano capacity.

what was the first time through the castle like (e.g. someone mentioned that there wouldn’t be any drying clothes)?  

It was a long time ago — he doesn’t remember.  He just has to go through the same process each time, making tiny advances toward breakthrough.  It was *brilliant* to reveal at the end that we’ve been dropped in medias res, after thousands of Doctor-skulls have already accumulated on the sea floor around the castle.  Wow.  This isn’t the first time, and it isn’t the last — we have to go 4 billion years around and around with him to get there.

Did we witness the creation of the confession dial (which would logically explain why Me took it from the Doctor — to avoid having the dial within the dial)? Or was the Doctor transported into the dial at the end of Raven and the dial was transported to Gallifrey?

Big question, and thanks for putting it so clearly; I’ve been trying to and failing.

@nerys  Best review I have read of “Heaven Sent”

Excellent, thanks so much!  It was something in the comments below — about continuity and cloning — that made me think that the ending montage of those 4 billion loop-years may be what Moffat meant by saying that the end of S9 would make us re-think everything we think we know about TL regeneration.  Each Doctor really does die; each regeneration births a new Doctor, but who is he, really?  What SmithDoc said: “Some other bloke walks away . . .”  Carrying all of his memories, but still “some other bloke”.  The Doctor has obliterated himself how many times now in 4 billion years of Dial time in his determination to break free rather than give up the secrets of the hybrid, or disappoint an imaginary version of Clara?  Good gods!

@mudlark  That was magnificent; a tour de force on the part of everyone concerned in its production, and breathtaking even on second viewing – in fact *especially* on second viewing. Count me among those who rate this among the best episodes ever.

Indeed; preach it!  Your post, magnificent too.  I’m so glad you didn’t break your neck . . . !  I’ll be giving that several readings, its so tightly packed with excellent observations and thoughts.

@miapatrick  very doctor- assuming what he said when he got out of the dial was the truth- stubborn and bloody minded and only ever so slightly showing off. He didn’t confess in the end, he made his way there and told them something.

Precisely: on his own terms, damn it, with implications of somebody else’s Hell to come — action, not just reaction.

@whisht  he he discovers (somehow – I have no idea how) that to get to Gallifrey, he will have to get through an ‘impossible’ barrier (the very thick diamond). Its an impossible barrier… except that ‘eternity’ makes everything possible if you’re persistent enough. But how would he be persistent enough? Well, he’d give himself a puzzle and he’d forget he’d given it to himself (as he did in Time Heist).  And it would mean he’d have to suffer a lot but… he chooses to do so because its . . . the only option he sees as working.  In this way, he’d leave the clothes out, the lupe etc to guide him to an answer which guides him to the punching/pecking slowly through the ‘impossible’ wall.

Oh, that’s wonderful!  I don’t know where the time would be, though, for him to work all that out and set it up between being teleported by Ashildr and stepping out into the castle room the first time.  Unless . . . well, what?  Beautiful bonkers, thank you.

 

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Here’s a little something about skulls, picked up on tumblr:

“We had Peter in for a lifecast for episodes three and four [Under the Lake and Before the Flood] as we’d made prosthetics for the Ghost Doctor,” Kate Walshe, SFX producer at Millennium FX, told RadioTimes.com. “As we already had his lifecast, [producer] Pete Bennett and I discussed the possibility of making a skull based on Peter’s own face.

“We cast a version of Peter’s face out in clay and, following the contours of his distinctive bone structure, pared the form back to reveal what we imagine may be Peter’s own skull.”

Gobsmacked.  So, just when did they tell him his “alas poor Yorick” moment would be to a model of his own skull, d’ya think?

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@jphamlore  It may be as a defense mechanism to hacking, the Confession Dial is programmed to destroy any invader that does not correctly answer what its contents are. It is possible the Time Lords did not intend to torture the Doctor, or even to learn the nature of the hybrid, things just worked out that way.

Interesting possibility!

@arch   I always suspend disbelief when I watch sci fi so I may not be as bothered as some others with the impossible. Bring on next week is all I can say.

I’ve got to say, it was no effort to suspend my disbelief.  Capaldi’s performance just yanked me right under, and I still haven’t exactly come back up.  I *loved* the little touches of humor along the way — nobody cracks wise like the Doctor.  Moffat, a thousand thanks for this beautiful piece of workmanship!

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@lisa   I did like how he fell back into his comfort zone which was having Clara and the Tardis aka his mind when he needed his ‘deliberations’ . That’s how he managed his sanity.

Yes — that gave him someone to talk to besides the Veil.  About his sanity, I dunno . . . he could yet do something terrible, and need to restore himself from that.

@puroandson  I’m going to take the audio voice out and just listen to the music on the stereo -that will be very interesting. let the story with its action and the music give us the directions to the conclusion.

Damn!  I wish I could to that — are you using a high-end sound bar that lets you separate the tracks?

@countscarlioni  “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”

Thank you for that!  I’ve been worrying that story and the diamond mountain and the persistent bird.  None of it made sense to me, but now it does.   Gods, weren’t his hands a mess . . . and it took me a couple of looks to catch where that wired-up skull had come from . . .

@puroandson   Without Clara’s death would he have been there forever: literally forever? Or would he have died and given up which is against his creed

Son of puro, what a great question!  He asks how long; without the help of Clara-in-his-mind, the One Who Never Leaves, he might never have broken through into Gallifrey.

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@juniperfish  Maybe the Time Lords figured out that only the doctor could break through, as the originator, but that he would never do it, unless they could get him angry enough – so they did.

I think that’s it, or anyway part of it.

Oh, there’s going to be a Hell of a bill presented, isn’t there.

Love it that the Doctor’s idea of Hell is “Heaven for bad people”, but this is what it turns out to be for him — no people at all; just him.  And his internalized Clara, who by gum saves him again — by telling him what all who lose people and grieve for them have to learn eventually: everybody loses people, so get up off your ass and get cracking!  What a beautiful coda for her.  And look how neatly they managed to keep *that* secret!

I’m glad he tells the boy at the end, “I know what they’ve done,” because that suggests that he’ll tell us next time, so I can understand it, because right now — Ah.  No.  Not really.

And, hurray, the tarot structure works!  Love that.  Love everything.  Gotta calm down.

Wine, I think.  Lots.

 

 

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Well, that was — my head’s spinning and my stomach is all knotted up from the tension and the need to concentrate really hard.  It didn’t help that my TV’s sound is crap, and the music was pretty loud sometimes when he was speaking.  Once I nab the episode and can replay it on my computer, I’ll be able to catch what I couldn’t hear this time.  Til then, I’m confused — but replete.  That was gorgeous.

And yes, we have a snake-reminder: the castle sections turning and turning was like the snake-segments of the face of Colony Sarff turning, back in the beginning of S9.

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@miapatrick   In Russia the serfs/slaves/robots who came with the land were sometimes referred to as ‘souls’ in transfer documents and I don’t think they meant that the owners owned their immortal spirit.

They used to talk of disasters in similar language — such and such a ship sank and 120 souls were lost.  I think it just meant “living human beings”, as all were assumed to have souls whatever religion was involved.  Which works fine with this:

@phaseshift   it has been used in the old series and as a concept is mixed up with the animating principle and consciousness, not the particular everlasting soul concept of religion.

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@janetteb   That’s a hellish amount of fire-damage.  I’m sorry to hear that it was so bad.  I remember reading about Australian bush fires in “The Thorn Birds”, many years ago.  It sounded horrible then, and it sounds horrible now.  When my sister lived in California, every summer she’d be fretting fiercely over the fire danger because she had horses; but she was in a semi-urban setting where there’s been an organized animal-rescue operation in case of fire for a long time, and having horses meant keeping two or three in a big back yard, not farming livestock.  Must have been a hell of a wind blowing, too, for the fire to move that fast.

 

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@lisa   I really would be surprised if we don’t see some “greying” up of the “baddies” ie the Daleks as a result of the Doctor going back and rescuing Davros from the handminefield. I think the days of “good humans”, verses “bad aliens” are well and truly past.

I like the way you’re thinking here; that would certainly be a solid cap to themes in Into the Dalek and the two Zygon stories.  Of course we’ve had good aliens and bad humans aplenty on DW for decades, but to take an arch-enemy like the Daleks and complexify them enough to make a real truce possible — that would be very daring.  Probably upsetting, too, to lots of fans who like their Daleks as a “pure” evil for the Doctor to oppose and outwit.  Now, that’s a risk that Moffat & gang might not be willing to take on . . .

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Just thinking about what’s coming: all of us who’ve said we would gladly tune in to watch Peter Capaldi read the telephone directory will now have a chance to test that for real — except this isn’t going to be the phone book. This looks like the Doctor’s breakdown — the real thing, not a sad-face broody bit with friends around trying to help, and then some healing happiness to round things up with a smile; or for that matter a burst of cathartic revenge or even modest violence (it’s DW, after all).  Much richer than than, I think.

As the Doctor’s anti-war monologue played off Bonnie and Kate in “The Zygon Invasion”, here in a lonely castle in the ocean the Doctor will play off two silent enemies: whoever made the kidnap bargain with Ashildr (this is when he addresses the screen/audience/tormentor in the short trailer released yesterday), and the shrouded figure pursuing him without speaking — the Veil.  I think we can add a third non-speaking presence — the damaged portrait of Clara over the fireplace.  Alone, but not alone; this is a great set up.  The phones will be turned off in this house.

Big risk, big payoff — or big fail, crash and burn. I love the risks the creative crew have taken in S8 and S9 (the Doctor as “old” and acerbic after Smith and Tenant, Clara going Real Girl on us including ego and lies, “fabulations” like Kill the Moon and itFotN, the viewpoint-scramble and uncertainty of Sleep no More, Master-to-Missy, etc.).   This is another leap in the dark.

I’m betting, Big Payoff.

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@mersey  Clara will get some reward and the only reward I can imagine is Danny. (What exactly had happend to his soul after their last meeting? Had it just vanished?).

Depends, doesn’t it?  On that still open questions, what does “soul” mean in Doctor Who?  I don’t recall BG Doctors using the word “soul” this way.  The Doctor seems to be an atheist (willing to be convinced, but skeptical because so far, he hasn’t found much in the way of God, gods, Heaven, or Hell in the traditional sense of those words).  So what is a “soul” to Ashildr, or the entity she’s made her bargain with, or for that matter to the shade/raven?  Let alone to the Doctor, who now is using this word.  Questions; I have no answers.

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@Carrianne I’m thinking it would take a piano sized brain to keep track of all the theories that we spin here!  I don’t think we’re territorial about which ones were whose, so I wouldn’t worry about it.  It’s kind of a very individualized communal effort, or something . . .

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@nerys   At some point some kindly doctor told me that without my glasses I was “legally blind”, which was charming to hear — made me feel so *special!* — but I really didn’t care much, as long as I could still get glasses or lenses, later, correcting my sight.  He was probably reading something wrong, that guy.  Maybe he needed to have his eyes checked.

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@janetteb  I think what really frightened me as a child was the music which is why I am certain that particular show that effected me was Dr Who.

It’s funny being audio-oriented in a visually-oriented culture.  That’s my situation, anyway — maybe from having had bad near-sightedness from at least the age of six, diagnosed as progressive myopia, and indeed I’ve been running all my life just on the frontier between severe myopia and increasingly sophisticated tech for correcting poor vision.  With cataract surgery (during which implanted corrective lenses were put in place), has come much more easily corrected nearsightedness, and lo, I am back to eyeglasses again.

Music was my lifeline as a kid.  Less so, now, but sometimes still.  Movie and TV scores interest me for their power to create or amplify meaning.

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@mersey  Your theory is very bold.  It makes the Doctor co-evil and co-conspirator with Missy, two villains bringing down a virtuous heroine and her consort — congratulations on bonkerizing far out indeed.

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@pedant  Malice is sufficient, but not necessary, to establish responsibility.

My mistake; I was thinking karmically (as I understand it), not legally.  Manslaughter, I suppose, lies between, then a spectrum of negligence leading to accident/act of god kind of thing..

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@puroandson  Good to hear from you!  “Things to do” sounds promising, in terms of feeling better — here’s hoping that’s so.

ichi

p.s.  That is one smart, articulate, well-mannered kid you’ve got there.  I used to teach 14 year olds.  You got a good one, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

 

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@mersey  Sounds as if I need to entertain myself this coming dead season with a re-watch of Series 5!

Here’s a thing: I just can’t help myself.

https://www.facebook.com/MANDATORY/photos/a.251564004947905.47255.205523986218574/649263355177966/?type=3&theater

I hope the link works — it’s worth it.

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@juniperfish  The fault for anyone’s death always lies with the one (or those) who dealt it.

I’d modify that: anyone (or those) who *intentionally and with malice* dealt it.  Intention, to my mind, is key.  Accidents do happen; that’s a hazard of the physical plane.

@carrieanne  If my burbling here has given you more diverting ways of looking at this wonderful show, I have to say that I feel honored!  So many really clever and insightful people are involved in this conversation — I feel I’ve been privileged to find and join it, and I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Your musings on the “story/dreams” aspect of this season is interesting — I keep forgetting that Ashildr was a story-teller in her girlhood, the puppets she used for her stories (well, the dragon one, which actually looked like a carved figurehead to me, not a moveable puppet) made a difference, a big one, in the life of her village when False Odin and the Doctor came to call.  And she’s still reading the stories in her own diaries, in Raven.  The idea of story itself as a force at play is active in this season on so many levels, enriching what happens (we’re going to see a humdinger Saturday night — well, half of it).

So where does it go from here?  That depends . . . thereby hangs a tale.

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