Below is my answer to the question I posed in the previous post about Time Lord free will. Please read the previous post or this will seem even more random. And yes, it contains spoilers.



Thank you all for your thoughts on why the Doctor made his way back to the top of the tower after discovering Door 12. And also for your philosophies on the meaning of Heaven Sent and Free Will vs. Determinism.

Thank the universe for Doctor Who fandom.

During my prep-time on Heaven Sent, I was, as mentioned in the previous post, puzzling my way through the middle section of the script, trying to work out the Doctor’s motivations in each scene.

The first time I read the script, I knew nothing, of course. I knew less than the average viewer, because I had not seen (or read) all the previous scripts. I had read 1-4 and 10, so I knew Clara had ‘faced the Raven’. I didn’t know it was the Time Lords who had taken the Doctor, I didn’t know much about the Confession Dial.

That first read is very important. It’s the only time I have an experience equivalent to being a virgin viewer. It’s the best time for me to ‘see’ the episode as it unfolds, not burdened by knowing the punchline, nor by the issues of production. As I read, my thoughts were rife with conjecture and speculation. When the doctor dug up the paving slab from the pantry and it said “I am in 12”, I wondered if it was somehow Clara — in some Doctor Who-niverse spin on death, she wasn’t really dead (oh, how could that be?!) and she was waiting for him. Or it was the Master of his destiny, his captor? Or someone else? Someone we had met or some story explained in scripts 5-9? The Mistress? (except I knew it wasn’t because I knew Gomez was not in the finale).

So, I thought that the Doctor must be desperate to find 12 and uncover the secret. But Steven delayed the answers with a montage of scenes where the Doctor peels back the layers of the castle and realizes he might be stuck in it for eternity constantly pursued by the Veil. How fully is he trapped? Is he going crazy? As I worked through prep, questions kept recurring - how to represent this section and keep it compelling? Why wasn’t finding Room 12 the only goal? As I was working out visuals to portray the Doctor’s moods, it bothered me that the Doctor found room 12 and then, seemingly randomly, went back to the top of the castle to talk to Clara, rather than just confess and open door 12 right away.

And then, sitting in Pizza Express on a recce, I had a lightbulb moment. Room 12 is hidden at the bottom of the castle (as witnessed by the Doctor’s interminable near-death crawl up the stairs to the teleport chamber) and the top of the tower is (one of) the highest points in the castle.

So he has gone up there to confess in order to lure the Veil the furthest distance from Room 12, so he maximizes his time to deal with Room 12, whatever it is, before the Veil comes for him.

Now, I know this isn’t so obvious to the viewer because the design and the geography of the castle is confusing. Of course. It rotates and changes, it’s Time Lord technology. But the central tower stays as the axle. And I wondered if it was possible to understand it from what we shot, or at least to get a sense of it? No one seemed worried about any of this, but in prep, when everything was speculative, I had to do that thought experiment.

I checked in with Steven Moffat, who confirmed it but wasn’t worried that it was a subtle point. Let the audience figure it out on repeat viewings, if need be. That’s assuming they watch this episode at all, I worried. We were at the stage where the idea of a solo-Doctor episode was speculative anarchic madness. And no one was sure we could pull off the insane script.

It’s clearly not a critical plot point, the episode seems to draw the viewers through wherever we take them, with enough mystery, dread, and plot to keep them from worrying about this moment. It’s really not important. I didn’t mean to waste your time.

Filmmaking is never a science. It evolves. The process of juxtaposing different images with varying sounds and music creates very different responses dependent on the choices. I’m endlessly fascinated by it, one reason I think I have one of the coolest jobs on the planet. And I get to work on one of the greatest shows in history. #LivingTheDream – kinda.