10 Years Later, Doctor Who’s “Heaven Sent” Is Still A TV Masterpiece
"How many seconds in eternity?"
“As you come into this world, something else is also born. You begin your life, and it begins a journey towards you. It moves slowly, but it never stops. Wherever you go, whatever path you take, it will follow...”
In the opening narration of “Heaven Sent,” the penultimate episode of Doctor Who Season 9 and the show’s best episode ever, the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) seems like he could be referring to death. After all, what is more present in our lives than the looming certainty that those lives will eventually end? It’s a key question that the Doctor wrestles with over the course of the masterful hour of television that is “Heaven Sent,” too: As he finds himself trapped in a giant labyrinthine castle, he is chased by a slow, monstrous, lumbering figure known only as The Veil, which threatens to murder him unless he confesses his darkest secrets.
But as the episode unfolds, and its true horrifying nature is unveiled (pun intended), it becomes clear that the metaphor at the center of “Heaven Sent” is two-fold: the other thing that constantly chases you until it catches up and consumes you is...grief. “All of us are locked in a castle of grief sometime,” writer and showrunner Steven Moffat said in one behind-the-scenes featurette on the episode. “And that’s kind of the story: fighting his way out of loss.”
Spoilers ahead!
“Heaven Sent” picks up immediately after the Doctor suffered the devastating loss of his closest companion, Clara (Jenna Coleman). But before he can process her death, or even pick her body off the street where it lies, he’s teleported to the castle where he finds himself trapped in his own personal hell, and pursued by the stuff of his nightmares. And as he explores the castle, he discovers clues left behind by someone pointing him to the way out. But it takes everything the Doctor has — both his inhuman cleverness and resolve — to defeat the castle and its monster.
On paper, “Heaven Sent” is a relatively straightforward story. The Doctor, alone, trapped in one location with one monster. Even director Rachel Talalay, delivering some career-best work in this breathtaking, hauntingly-shot episode, thought so at first, too. But like its rich, deeply complex themes, the structure of “Heaven Sent” is deceptively simple. It comes down to the big twist of the episode, which reveals that the Doctor is stuck in a time loop. He is not the first version of the Doctor to arrive in this castle, nor will he be the last. And the only way to break this time loop is to do the impossible: face his grief head-on. Or, in other words, spend billions of years and thousands of bodies punching through a diamond wall.
Therein lies the genius of the episode: that the central plot twist also doubles as its emotional climax. The Doctor would rather sacrifice himself over and over before giving his enemies the confession they want (the truth about the Hybrid, the red herring for the season’s overarching storyline). And similarly, the Doctor must be consumed by grief over and over before he finally breaks through an impossibly hard wall and frees himself from it. It’s an incredible feat to turn grief into, essentially, the show’s monster-of-the-week, but Moffat, who talks about the process of achieving that in Doctor Who Magazine, revealed how he did it:
I thought, 'People always talk about grief as being alone,’ so I made the Doctor absolutely alone. Grief comes and finds you every time you stop or rest, so I gave him the Veil. And grief is , waking up to the same pain every day, and trying to smash through it, so I gave him a diamond wall to punch for the rest of time, Basically, he wore away a mountain with his tears.”
The Doctor finds comfort in a battered portrait of Clara he discovers in the castle.
It’s that heady mix of ideas that Moffat threads in his script, combining the best of his puzzle-box writing with his and Capaldi’s willingness to explore the Doctor as a character and interrogate Doctor Who as a show. In one BBC featurette, Capaldi revealed that he’s always thought the show was “about death,” saying, “It has a very, very powerful death motif in it, which is that the central character dies. And I think that is one of its most potent mysteries. Because somewhere in that, people see that’s what happens in life, you have loved ones, and then, they go. But you must carry on.”
In literalizing that battle with grief, “Heaven Sent” does what Doctor Who, and television in general, does best: turn an experience so awful, and abstract, and unspeakable, into something tangible. It’s the kind of storytelling that the best genre TV excels at: whether it’s Lost’s love-through-time masterpiece “The Constant,” or Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s own grappling with the absurdity of death in “The Body,” or any episode of The Leftovers. “Heaven Sent should’ve automatically landed on every “Best TV Episodes Of All Time” list, yet it’s barely spoken of outside of Doctor Who circles. Why?
Despite its accolades, “Heaven Sent” is largely forgotten outside of Doctor Who fan circles.
When “Heaven Sent” premiered in November 2015, it received near-universal acclaim for Moffat’s script and Talalay’s moody, striking direction. It was praised for its avant-garde nature, its expressionist visuals, and how it evoked Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic The Seventh Seal, but was also criticized for being too confusing and inaccessible to the average Doctor Who viewer. And though its experimental nature earned the episode a Hugo Award nomination, it ultimately lost out to an episode of Jessica Jones. (And you can forget any recognition from the Emmys.)
It may be because “Heaven Sent,” despite tackling universal themes of grief and mortality, is inseparable from Doctor Who, the show. Moffat’s other universally-acclaimed story, “Blink” is still praised as the best episode of the series, mainly because it requires little introduction into the concepts of Doctor Who. But “Heaven Sent” operates on the assumption that its viewer has not only been enthusiastically watching Doctor Who, but that they’re interested in seeing the show and its lead character be interrogated and dissected in ways they never had before. How does the man who always runs away deal with his grief when he’s forced to stay in one spot? What is the show’s relationship to death?
Those are the questions that elevate “Heaven Sent” from simply being a good episode of television to a great one — nay, a masterpiece. It may be 10 years since it hasn’t received the recognition that it deserves, but that’s okay, we can wait. After all, if the Doctor can wait an eternity, so can we.
