This episode is a tour de force, both acting and directing wise. It is beautifully filmed, fantastically well edited and as terrifying, at times, as it is poignant. It is also, as the Doctor quite rightly says, theatre. It is theatre of the highest caliber with Peter Capaldi giving a heart-breaking, poignant, stunning, monologue performance to be remembered.
Doctor Who is basically family viewing. It's a cross between children's drama and something teenagers might devour - downloaded byte by byte - that their parents wouldn't bother with. It's scary and thrilling, inspiring and funny. Usually. But, in this episode, Steven Moffat gives us something quite different; something to make an older viewer hide behind the sofa. Whilst younger viewers may be scared by the veiled figure stalking the Doctor, by its shadow creeping along the castle wall, or by the seabed littered with skulls, nightmarish subtleties surrounding the existential crisis the Doctor finds himself trapped in are - I assume - beyond the comprehension of most younger viewers. If you're older that torture-loop is terrifying. And, it's all the more terrifying when you realise the extent to which it's self inflicted.
Grief. Guilt. Recrimination. Loneliness. Such are the Doctor's companions, during his long stay trapped in this castle keep, possibly for all time.
The start of this episode isn't the start of this adventure. Or should I say nightmare? The Doctor arrives at an unknown location, in an unknown timezone, seemingly the only guest in a castle floating upon an endless sea. A castle that is automated, rather than magical. The beast trapped within the castle, with the Doctor? A veiled figure - the stuff of his childhood nightmares. A hooded, shrouded, figure who stalks the living is (of course) an archetypal personification of death, here seen without a scythe. The costume, prop, and special effects departments may have drawn upon Tolkien and his Nazgul, but it's unlikely younger viewers won't spot the nod to dementors in this being who terrifies the Doctor, first spying, then later attacking and killing him.
Again
&
Again
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Again.
In Heaven Sent, for the first time in many a century, the Doctor is totally alone. No rain-cloud at the top of a tree to retreat to. No friend-adjacent locale. No 'Handles' either with whom to communicate and so keep the silence at bay. Clara Oswald died in the previous episode and the final moments of her life haunt the Doctor. The moment of her death is brilliantly intercut into the action, a memory that (it is implied) loops like the episode itself within the Doctor's mind; for we are in the Doctor's mind as much as we are anywhere.
What is real? What is imagined?
Given the TARDIS stands in brilliantly as the Doctor's memory palace and that this medieval castle re-sets itself every time a long held secret of his is offered up as truth, it's also possible to read the castle as a memory palace, rather than a physical reality.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
The Sonnets of Desolation or Terrible Sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins are a group of untitled poems probably written during 1885-1886 by the Victorian Reverend poet. Their theme is undoubtedly despair and desolation. Their tone resonates with the mood of this episode, completely. The quote above is from the poem "No Worst" which vividly captures the depressive's terror of falling over the edge into insanity.
Has the Doctor run mad; trapped within a revolving, resetting, castle? His very own torturous puzzle-box? His private Azkaban?
Grief is a kind of madness.
When did I realise the Doctor was trapped in a looping nightmare? Like most viewers (no doubt) when he took his first dip in the sea, then made his way back into the castle to discover a dry suit of clothes hung upon a fire screen, in front of a low burning fire - boots positioned just so - so that the leather could dry out. A suit of clothes identical to the drenched ones he had on. But it took his first death on screen for me to realise the magnitude of the trap he finds himself caught in. It took that death (or harvesting of self) for me to realise all the skulls beneath the waves were his. I had vaguely assumed the burnt hand at the start of the episode - which activated the transport lever apparently bringing the Doctor to this, his imprisonment - might be his own. I never assumed there were, or had been, other prisoners. After all the voice-over makes it very clear we're watching the Doctor caught in his own private hell. And, that we're possibly watching the Doctor in his final hours. It was only later, watching the genius that is the edited montage, that I realised we'd be watching those final hours on repeat.
Time Lords are endless, except when they're not. It's poetically apt their nightmares should be endless, except when they're not.
As an aside, it may interest you to know that the skulls used in the production are actually created from a mould, or cast of Peter Capaldi's face and head, initially used for the holographic ghost in Under the Lake/Before the Flood.
If Clara spent all this series (and most of the last two) walking in the Doctor's footsteps - becoming just like him - here (bereft of her) the Time Lord mirrors Clara: becoming a series of echoes of himself. Clara Oswald jumped into the Doctor’s time stream in Trenzelore and multiple, possible, versions of herself appeared across all of time and space. Each self met the Doctor, each Clara trying to help or save him. In Heaven Sent it's the Doctor who is one of an endless series of echoes of self; trying to save himself. Trying and finally wondering if there is any reason to.
On one level this episode is purely about grief. Loss. The days after someone you love dies, for as the Doctor aptly states and Moffat poetically writes:
"The Doctor: It's funny, the day you lose someone isn't the worst. At least you've got something to do. It's all the days they stay dead."
Interestingly, Steven Moffat seems to have loosely woven the structure of the episode on on Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Five Stages of Grief. These are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance". I'd say denial is the emotion which carries the Doctor from the closing scenes in Face the Raven to the opening moments of Heaven Sent and acceptance is, of course, the emotion manifested once he hallucinates Clara, touching his cheek, reminding him that he's -
Ghost!Clara: [...not the only person who ever lost someone. It's the story of everybody. Get over it. Beat it. Break free.
It's acceptance that he has to get up and fight - for himself - rather than giving up. Acceptance that he has to fight on, despite having lost Clara. Grief is shattering and grieve the Doctor indeed does, more so because guilt lies heavy on his heart. Clara Oswald died because she learned to ape the Doctor too closely.
Doctor: What would you do?
Ghost!Clara: Same as you.
Doctor: Yes, yes you would, which let's be honest is what killed you.
What is fantastic, narratorially, is that this episode shows how far the Doctor has come, how he's grown, his character arc developing from the Doctor who was Ten. It's also, amusingly, personal growth as perceived by two different show runners. When Matt Smith guest starred in Russel T. Davies' The Sarah Jane Adventures in The Death of the Doctor he tells Jo Grant (a previous companion who travelled with John Pertwee/Three) that: "I don't look back, I can't." Here, not only does the Doctor acknowledge the part he played in shaping Clara Oswald, which led to her death, but he is quite literally digging his own grave as he tries to find a way to escape from the trap he's in. His own worst enemy, the Doctor's punishing himself (for Clara's death) and for the longest time, feels that he deserves the torment and fear he experiences within this resetting nightmare.
Doctor: Or maybe I'm in Hell? That's OK. I'm not scared of Hell. It's just Heaven for bad people.
What is of course unspoken here is his own belief that he's a 'bad' person, rather than a good man which is what he has striven to be.
There are nods throughout this episode to earlier ones; moments which resonate back through both Twelve and Eleven's timelines. Obviously the skulls littering the ocean floor call to mind the Doctor's ghostly figure in Under the Lake/Before the flood. But the castle (with its spice rack and hanging copper pots) is also reminiscent of the doll house in Night Terrors, where Amy and Rory were trapped by a little alien boy's fears. Clara's portrait, hanging on the castle wall, is a reminder that the Doctor once painted her picture whilst on retreat from the universe in a monastery in The Bells of St John. And the castle room numbers, of course, echo back to Toby Whithouse's The God Complex. But, most importantly, Clara's figure appearing in the Doctor's memory-palace!TARDIS reminds us of Amy Pond's final farewell to her Raggedy Doctor, in The Time of the Doctor. And, above all, 'Clara' asking the Doctor questions by writing them in chalk on a blackboard takes us back to Listen.
In Listen the Doctor is haunted by a childhood fear, one barely recalled. In Heaven Sent such subliminal fears are multiplied, refracted and compounded. Here Steven Moffat plays with primal, archetypal, fears: Being buried alive. Drowning. Starving. Lack of sleep. All known tortures. Even with Rachel Talalay's brilliant direction I'm unsure as to whether the interior of a confession dial is a real physical universe, or not. Everything here is real and nothing here is real, apart from the emotions the Doctor carried in with him when he was teleported to the castle. Given that he is indeed the Doctor, one such emotion is sheer, bloody, willful stubbornness and an inability to give up, or to give in.
In Heaven Sent Steven Moffat clearly name checks the Brother's Grimm, referencing a short story The Shepherd Boy in which a young boy, renowned for his wisdom, is brought before a king. He's offered a place in his household, as his son, if he can answer three questions truthfully. Within the Grimm fable/allegory there is a castle, an ocean and a diamond mine. All here are transmuted into a clockwork-castle, floating atop an endless sea, encased within a diamond. And in the original fable there is also a bird whose beak pecks away at that diamond. Given that the shepherd boy will grow up to be a king, it is possible to perceive the tale as a Christian allegory, with the kingdom to be inherited, heaven. If Steven Moffat is drawing on Christian allegory (in the vein of traditional children's literature such as The Chronicles of Narnia) then it's possible influences from Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy also echo through this episode. Dante's epic poem was written between 1308 and 1320 and is considered a preeminent work of Italian literature. It describes the authors journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. For all that the Doctor doesn't meet a single soul during the twenty million years he's caught in the castle's temporal loop, I can't help feeling this is a representation of purgatory, somewhat inspired by Dante. After all, for Dante purgatory was made up of levels ascending a mountain, at the top of which was an earthly heaven.
Not that heaven is hidden behind the wall made of diamond, regardless of the episode's title. Etched upon the wall, taunting the Doctor, is one word. Home. It's for that word, that goal, that he punches his fist into unbreakable rock, over and over again. Punching. Dying. Re-materialising. Realising. Punching… Suffering, repeatedly, in the belief that one day soon he will win out over that wall and circumstance. Believing that he will win out due to sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. It's poignant and apt that the Doctor (and we) considers the TARDIS his home, rather than the planet of his origin. I never thought he'd break through the diamond rock face to find anything other than the TARDIS.
The end of the episode reveals he's been watched all along. Over the entire series arc? Watched from the moment Eleven didn't die and was instead gifted with further regenerations? It's possible. The finale may elucidate. The use of black and white film (images filmed with a fishbowl lens and projected onto the television screens mounted on the castle walls) plus the way reality freezes when the Doctor admits long-held truths lead me to wonder if the director (and Steven Moffat) wasn't teasing - the flies spy-cams, or fly-cams. How data is transmitted from the castle and how the Doctor's confessions are heard isn't important, in much the same way how the teleport works is irrelevant. Moffat uses the example of 3-D printing as surprisingly effective visual shorthand, with the Doctor burning up his body to fuel the teleporter. It's regeneration, but not as we know it. Timelord science, but not as we know it.
Watching this episode, knowing the Time Lords' actions inadvertently lead to Clara's death and that they orchestrated the capture and imprisonment of the Doctor, it's impossible to think of them in a favourable light. They trapped the Doctor. Tortured him for twenty million years...
How does a Time Lord perceive time and can that be altered? This episode presumes as much:
The Doctor: "[...who's been playing about with the stars? They're all in the wrong places, for this time zone, anyway. I know I didn't time travel to get here. I can feel time travel. If I didn't know better, I'd say I've travelled 7,000 years into the future. But I do know better. So, who moved the stars?"
Or, in the immortal words of Lewis Carroll:
Peter Capaldi is a phenomenal actor. This episode is a phenomenal vehicle for his talent, but it's also brilliantly directed as regards pacing, tension and scaring the crap out of those of us not hiding behind the sofa! When the shrouded figure attempted to accost the Doctor in the castle's walled garden, I nearly jumped out of my skin. And as Twelve dug his own grave, standing in it almost to shoulder height, I was terrified he'd be buried alive, right before the shrouded figure leapt into frame, its clawed hand lunging for him. That's thanks to the direction and to Murray Gold's score.
But, above all, it's down to Capaldi's acting. He is a fantastic actor. That is evident in the quietest of moments: entreating a castle door to open and give him sanctuary, the way his voice breaks, softly, when the Doctor turns to tell Clara something and she isn't there, the way he finally collapses down onto the steps of the memory-palace!TARDIS and almost weeps. He is utterly believable as a man both bereft and exhausted. And then, as Twelve, we watch him drag his broken, bleeding, body across castle corridors and up circular stone stairs, one pained breath at a time. In a very visceral way, far, far, more poignantly here we're watching the Doctor die in a way Eleven never did, when Matt Smith was aged with latex and pancake make-up, the Doctor making his stand in the town known as Christmas.
Peter Capaldi give a stunning, extraordinary, performance as the Doctor. It's possible it can never be bettered but, damn I'd love to see him try!