Day 824: Heaven Sent

It's hard to believe it, but after producing at least one Doctor Who story a year since 2005 (save for 2009), Steven Moffat still has the capacity to provide something completely unique and unlike anything else that's been seen in Doctor Who before. Because that's what Heaven Sent is. It's a beautifully unique story that somehow manages to still be a recognisable Doctor Who story. And it is, in my personal opinion, one of the most powerful episodes of Doctor Who ever produced.

Heaven Sent works as a story because it never loses sight of its goal. This goal being that we have to follow the Doctor as he figures out what is happening in his impossible situation and then watch as he figures out a solution to the impossible problem or, as is put in the episode, is able to win. And this goal is a fairly basic goal, one that's behind most, if not all, Doctor Who stories. So Moffat, in order to make things interesting, adds enough dressing to keep the situation unwinnable, such as through making Capaldi's Doctor the only character, which keeps him from making allies or having an extra voice to discuss the problem with. Also, Moffat's decision to make the entire setting a literal puzzle box, with the rooms in the castle resetting and the layout changing when the Doctor figures out the ideal solution to the puzzle adds a further layer of mystery to the impossible goal, and continues to drive the Doctor to need to solve it, and by extension, we as the audience need to see him solve it.

And what ends up making the story interesting, above all else, is that it puts serious doubt on the Doctor's ability to 'win' the situation. This has happened before, it's a staple of a good many Doctor Who stories that we have to have some doubt about whether the Doctor can survive or not. But what makes Heaven Sent so different is that the doubt is coming from the Doctor. We see him go through the entire story becoming less and less confident in his own abilities as he begins to crave what he perceives to be the sweet release of eternal sleep. And when he realises that his method of winning has caused him thousands upon millions of years of sorrow, anguish and torment, he goes through so much mental pain and suffering, only to be spurred on by an image of Clara to go forth and win. And so, he does.

The final sequence in the castle is a masterpiece of editing and direction. Despite being constrained to showing the same sequence over and over again, through careful choice of shots and a nice decision to compress the sequence more and more as the years pass, it becomes a triumphant and powerful scene, something that reinforces this idea of the Doctor overcoming obstacles to win. And, notably, he does this on his own terms, deciding to brute force his way out of the castle rather than reveal the true identity of the Hybrid to the Veil. It's all something that proves to be absolutely fantastic, and leads into the finale - which quite notably, has something that has been in Doctor Who before and that really means a lot.