That was… really good. Eggy Lettuce, 15 years old – immediately after watching Heaven Sent

I first watched Heaven Sent after a week of anticipating the “one man tour-de-force” it was hyped up to be from the Next Time trailer of Face The Raven. The pre-reviews were in, talking of an absolute marvel of a watch, brought to life by Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat firing on all cylinders of their respective god-tier revolvers.

It aired on the day before my sixteenth birthday; Series Nine had been the first time I had actually been properly invested in Doctor Who since Series Six’s second half began with the incredibly sloppy Let’s Kill Hitler, and it was this very episode that encapsulated just how superb the show could be when it was performing at it’s best.

Heaven Sent is not only the best episode of the revival, but it’s the best episode in all 55+ years of the franchise, and it’s my favourite 60 minutes of TV I have ever watched. My opinion on it has only improved over time, too.

When I initially finished the episode I flocked to the Internets to discuss how bloody good it was with like-minded bean eaters. I thought it was fantastic, maybe not even the best episode of Series Nine though (for The Magician’s Apprentice really did a number on me at the time). At that time, I could easily say Capaldi was my favourite Doctor, but it was still Midnight, Human Nature, Blink, and Dalek which made up my “best episodes” list. I wouldn’t consider Heaven Sent better than them until two years later.

However, that’s not to say I didn’t appreciate it at the time.

I recently showed my girlfriend Heaven Sent. It’s the only episode of the show she likes (which says a lot about it’s quality) and her first reaction mirrored mine in 2015 – I was somewhat confused, and interpreted the whole design of the story to be a metaphor for overcoming depression and grief.

I mean, that’s excellent on it’s own – but Heaven Sent is much more than just that.

Actually, that was something special. Eggy Lettuce, 16 years old

I currently have Heaven Sent playing on the TV while I write this, I just can’t stop watching it – it’s an addiction, it’s an absolutely phenomenal piece of television i’d class on par (if not better than) Breaking Bad’s Ozymandias, Better Call Saul’s Chicanery, or Bojack Horseman’s Free Churros (to name a few similarly lauded bits of media).

Let’s just run through it.

That opening monologue – nice, how sweet. It’s short, poetic, tells you all you need to know about the concept of death “it never ever stops following you” which is recontextualised within the realm of Doctor Who; a main character who doesn’t just die, he changes.

As soon as the cogs start moving and the episode begins, we are greeted to Peter Capaldi, breathless, in a teleport inside a castle.

“I’m The Doctor. I’m coming for you, and I will never ever stop“.

That opening theme tune has never felt so good.

And then we get Peter Capaldi monologue-ing. I mean, this is pretty much the whole episode with it’s beautiful fourth-wall breaking dialogue, but it’s maybe at it’s best in the first few minutes. We see The Doctor working out a rough location as he talks to his possible captors through the walls. A hooded beast stalks him; it’s vision constantly shown on TV screens for The Doctor to watch.

He confesses “I am scared of dying” as he is cornered in a dead-end, he finally ran out of corridor, and the castle stops.

And so we learn the method of the place – it’s a torture chamber designed to get a confession, he is inside his Confession Dial, and the architects want to know who The Hybrid is.

Scenes of immediate action are split up by The Doctor entering his mind palace, the TARDIS, where he explains to the silent ghost of Clara how he escapes. The first instance is where he jumps out of a window to escape The Veil, after using petals to test the gravity, a broken window and the salty air to guess he will land in water, and all other such things.

The Doctor solves this problem mid-jump, it’s basically just rapid-fire exposition which makes no sense but BY GOD is it a gorgeous look into the psyche of this crazy time-travelling wizard. This man who is capable of always surviving, and we see here how he does.

Or rather, we see him work it out – the explanation doesn’t really matter.

What is this place? What did you say that made the creature stop? How are you going to…. WIN?

Are the questions “Clara” writes to him in his mindscape. The Doctor is tired, and awakens in a lake filled with skulls – but whose?

He finds a warm set of his clothes by a hearth, and swaps them for his damp ones, hanging them up just how the previous set were shown.

And thus we have The Doctor exploring this creepy castle (some absolutely great set design) with all it’s unique and interesting rooms. There are corridors which go nowhere, graveyards with empty pits, and hallways which change location with each confession – the whole place is designed to scare The Doctor, to get an answer from him. The Doctor is playing his own game though, following the twists and turns of the place to work out just who wants to know what The Hybrid is, and how he can escape.

The episode isn’t in silence from start to finish – no, it’s even better. The Doctor is talking to the audience (not in a CBBC presenter way, mind you), about Clara, about who he is, about why he does what he does.

Heaven Sent truly is an episode about Doctor Who.

“No no, that’s not right” he says after looking up at the stars – they aren’t the same stars he knows. They have aged a few millennia, but he hasn’t time travelled? So what gives? This mystery permeates through every scene, every clue, every cryptic chamber in the creepy castle.

“I AM IN 12” the grave he digs reads – leading him to another confession as The Veil attacks from the earth, a corpse draped in hot summer rags surrounded by flies, The Doctor’s childhood fear.

The Doctor reveals he never left Gallifrey due to boredom, but because he was scared. We never find out if this is a lie or not, but it seems to trick The Veil.

And so the best episode continues…

Why did I not love this sooner? Eggy Lettuce, 17 years old

The Doctor sees all the clues laid out for him in the castle, with the final one being the word “BIRD” scrawled in sand by someone’s dying fingers next to a burned out skull (who were the previous prisoners?).

He finds, after, a wall made of pure diamond, and pieces the bits of the puzzle together.

“Why can’t I just lose? Just this once?” he says, as the ghost of Clara tells him to win. The Doctor knows how he can escape the castle. Not through confession, but through the wall. Through “bird“.

And so the first punch flies, and he begins his speech.

“The Brothers Grimm, lovely fellas – they’re on my darts team. According to them; there’s this emperor, and he asks the shepherd’s boy: how many seconds in eternity?” – and The Doctor is scorched by The Veil where he stands. His barely living body lingers, and crawls back to the teleport at the start of the episode, finding the controls and the bit of sand on the floor. He falls, using himself as fuel for the teleport, and scrawls “bird” in the sand.

The episode begins anew; another Doctor arrives in the teleport, immediately after the last one died, and goes through the same cycle.

The window leaping, the set of clothes by the hearth (who else laid them there?), the exploring, the deducting, the realisation what the word “bird” means (a nice callback to paradoxes in Before The Flood).

The Doctor realises the truth – he hasn’t time travelled anywhere, he has just been there for a very very long time. Every room in the castle resets, the teleport brings The Doctor, he explores, he realises, he punches the diamond wall, he is wounded, he kills himself to restart the teleport.

And so on.

We see this through an incredibly powerful montage. The years, the decades, the centuries, the millennia, fly by as we see The Doctor caught in a constant loop of punching this diamond wall after days in the castle getting to that very point. His former self helps his future self as The Shepherd’s Boy by Murray Gold crescendoes in the background, and with each fist planted at the diamond wall it shrinks just a tiny bit more, and The Doctor gets more time to shout his triumphant speech, revealing more and more of his plans to the audience.

And then it CLICKS.

“And the shepherd’s boy says, ‘There’s this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it and an hour to go around it, and every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain. And when the entire mountain is chiselled away, the first second of eternity will have passed.“

If you’ve watched Heaven Sent you’re probably bored of me reciting what happens – if you haven’t watched it i’ve just ruined the CLICK moment in the last five minutes.

But that’s your fault, you should have already watched Heaven Sent.

Heaven Sent is about The Doctor – who he is, what he is, and what he always has to do. He solves problems for the right reasons, burns and regenerates, and then does it again as a new man, but they are always the same person deep down – held together by those same morals of education, of care, of risk, of selflessness

This is it. This is the peak of the show – the only episode I ever need to watch. Eggy Lettuce, 18 years old

People who know me often get annoyed I talk about Heaven Sent so much. I have a friend who thinks it’s the best episode of the show, sure, but it’s not “that good” – he says. Each to their own, but he’s not writing this review.

You already know I think it’s the greatest thing ever.

Heaven Sent is about grief, in some ways.

The Doctor is stuck in a maze, forced to deal with accepting that his actions lead to the death of his best friend. By the end of the episode a really powerful metaphor for smashing through depression is made, but still, I think Heaven Sent is something else.

Heaven Sent is about The Doctor running through endless repeating scenarios to escape Death, faced against insurmountable odds holding onto the slightest chance he has to save the life of an innocent.

He chooses the hardest way, the selfless way, and that’s how he saves the day.

Heaven Sent is, from a conceptual view at least, the only episode of the show you need to watch. It’s a perfect explanation of the character, and the lengths he will go to to save just one life.

Yep, still holds up. Eggy Lettuce, 19 years old

The Doctor punches through the diamond wall, after 4.5 billion years of zillions of his copies doing the exact same thing.

The Veil collapses, the castle disappears, and he steps through the portal to the other side.

An orange glare fills the screen. We see red fields and farmland, and a golden citadel. A shepherd’s boy runs up to The Doctor amidst the desert, as he dons his sonic shades.

“Go to the city, find somebody important. Tell them i’m back. Tell them, I know what they did, and i’m on my way. And if they ask you who I am, tell them I came the long way round.”

Gallifrey.

His own species had orchestrated this whole thing just to find out who The Hybrid is.

“The Hybrid, destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in it’s ruins. Is me.“

Cue the credits and me smiling like a child every-time I watch.

Yep, that’s Heaven Sent. The greatest episode in this 55+ year long sci-fi show, the greatest 60 minutes of TV I have personally ever seen, and the most powerful bit of media I have watched.

I fucking love Heaven Sent.

You’ve heard about this score. A legendary rating bestowed only to one episode in a million – something which is not only flawless in it’s execution but also truly special on a personal level.

Heaven Sent deserves that score. It is the episode of the show I watch the most, it resonates with me in the deepest way possible, and the final five-or-so minutes of wall-punching is without a doubt the most triumphant thing (fictional or no) I have ever seen.

There’s a reason this review is my longest yet, there’s a reason i’ve only come to love this episode more with age (yes, I am wizened beyond my years even at 19 it seems!), and there’s a reason Heaven Sent is not only god tier but elder god tier.

Said reason? Well, it just is.

You are wrong if you think it isn’t. There, I said it, sue me.

11/10

You might think that’s one hell of a score.

Personally, I think that’s one hell of an episode.