12.24: Heaven Sent
In which I cry, and cry, and cry.
Broadcast: November 2015
Watched: April 2022
I wrote what follows after watching the episode last year. By now, many of you will know that I unexpectedly, shockingly, lost my beloved partner Agnes last weekend. I, and our dog Henry Scampi, are being looked after and are being absolutely bathed in love, from family and close friends and long-lost friends and really pretty much everyone. But I am nonetheless lost and broken and have no idea what a future without her could possibly look like.
It was very odd realising what the next post I hadn’t edited was. Jim Cooray-Smith told me he’d realised and turned cold – but it is, if anything, a comfort. What I’ve been feeling these last few days is quite how brilliant a portrayal of the experience of grief Heaven Sent actually is. Each day, in between the hugs and the tears and the absolute overwhelming loss, there are still moments when you get up, crack jokes, make plans, tweet, and generally take practical steps to deal with the situation – do all the things you’d do in normal times. And each day, without warning, that all hits a point where you realise it doesn’t make a damned difference. You still have to go through all this again tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.
And as you do, she still won’t be here.
I knew that this episode was about grief. I knew it was amazing. But I didn’t truly feel its power until this week.
I know there are people who’ve worked on the TV show who read this blog, and while to the best of my knowledge Steven Moffat isn’t one of them, there is at least a chance this will make its way to him. So I’d just like to say: thank you, Steven, for writing this, for helping me, without even knowing it, at the very worst moment of my life. Thank you, for everything you and the show you made were to me.
Okay, that’s enough real stuff. Here’s what I wrote last year.
“I am the Doctor, I am coming to find you and I will never, ever stop.”
Perfect. Beautifully designed (oh my god, the moving castle) and performed, especially as he’s dying (”...something to burn”). And god, the sound track. The six minute montage, of scenes we’ve seen before over and over again at an ever accelerating piece, is quite possibly the most amazing thing the show has ever done. What’s more, that ending totally reframes the opening monologue about never giving up: it’s only at the end that we see how much he means it, but there’s added pathos, too. The Doctor will win; but first he must die, again, and again.
That winning by not winning is the key to the episode: the story isn’t just about grief, but about mortality. At first, it feels like the classic Moffat puzzle box - but the puzzle is incidental; solving it solves nothing. The problem can’t be fixed through cleverness or understanding. No matter how impressive the Doctor is, he’s still going to die. So are you.
This is presumably why death imagery is all over the story: the veil, the freshly dug grave (which at one point the veil literally bursts out of), the sea of skulls, the terrifying spooky faceless Clara, her back to the Doctor. Also the cross fade from the skull to Capaldi’s own head, hidden in plain sight.
It also fits with the way the story - like so much of this season - spends so much time unpacking the Doctor’s MO, as he imagines explaining how he survived to help him find the way he can do so... but again, it just doesn’t matter. Over and over again, the tricks fail him. At one point he unlocks a door by psychically communing with it - but beyond it, there’s just wall. Later on the music reaches its crescendo as he begins to punch the wall, Murray Gold’s standard language for “something incredible is about to happen”. But it doesn’t. The wall, for now, stays there. And also, it turns out that punching the hardest substance in existence really, really hurts. (Why doesn’t he use the shovel...?) The triumphal tone the story begins with is gradually stripped back to a point of complete vulnerability.
But then, new triumphal music gradually emerges as he climbs, dying, to the tower to begin again. Because not dying, even in death, is the Doctor’s oldest trick of all.
Doctor Who has had the lead’s death built into it since 1966. But this is the first time, I think, it manages to do a story about the inevitability of mortality, even though its hero is immortal.
Basically, it’s Doctor Who’s answer to The Ambassadors.
[Note from the present: I am much less certain of this reading now. Grief is quite theme enough.]
Other things:
Lot of Sherlock influence here, I think: the mind palace TARDIS, where he unpacks all his tricks, etc. This is also a story about Moffat explaining how you write someone cleverer than we are.
It is extremely weird to think that the Doctor dies in the opening seconds of this story. Must be unique.
That opening monologue sounds a lot like a metaphor for death. Very Doctor Who that it also turns out to be a specific description of this story - is it meant to be the Doctor talking to his other selves? Also, confusingly, it’s literally written on the wall at one point, and the Doctor doesn’t comment: it feels like a literalisation of the computer game vibe.
The creature is made of clockwork. Very Time Lord; very Moffat.
The lights coming back on in the dream TARDIS to reflect the Doctor regaining consciousness is accompanied by same music as in Amy’s Choice where think they’re waking up.
The chalk motif is back again - this time, it’s the way imaginary Clara communicates. The idea of teacher/student relationships is absolutely all over this era.
I’m not sure the resetting thing works perfectly. Did the first Doctor to arrive dive into the sea and then just go around naked afterwards since no one had left their suit drying before him? Why does the skull in the teleport room persist long enough to end up on sea floor? But this is nit picking, obviously.
Matt Smith Doctor’s fear was in room 11, Capaldi’s is in room 12.
Moffat’s weird approach to memory strikes again - like Rory, like in multiDoctor stories, the Doctor can both remember his experiences and not.
The Shobogan child in the very last scene looks confusingly like [name of beloved friend’s beloved child redacted].
I’d mildly disagree with Jim - if you’d been just one story behind I’d have gone cold too, but this... I’m not sure I’d suggest watching it as it’s often so raw, but it’s quite possibly the most eloquent and personal thing Steven’s written: as you point out, he strips back all his and the Doctor’s tricks as they’re useless in the face of something as all-encompassing as grief. Other stories are probably better Doctor Who, but this is something of extraordinary emotional heft. And I think this is stronger for Moffat’s stories often distorting themselves to avoid deaths and his Doctor’s fear of endings: it’s almost a thematic capstone to that undercurrent. It’s also an answer to the question ‘what bloody use is the Doctor in the face of real world tragedy?’ which finds a meaning without ever being trite about it.
Also *they put this out in prime time after Strictly on a Saturday night*.
As a coda to all that... I wrote a story for a War Doctor charity anthology in 2014 which riffed off pretty similar ideas, and a few friends have remarked on some plot similarities. I disagree though, it’s just two old fanboys working out what a Time Lord torture chamber would be. This feels like it’s using Doctor Who to tell a bigger, deeper, more truthful story: where Doctor Who usually hijacks other stories this feels like some older story that needed to be told hijacking the series.
Anyway, just wanted to say what an extraordinary piece this is: take care of yourself.
Oh Jonn. I’m so very sorry to hear about Agnes. Just the two seconds as you proudly introduced her as I drove by you in the cab the other week were enough to know how proud you were to introduce her as your partner and how you loved her. I know people who know you much better than I will be looking after you and there’s little I can do to help, but if and when the time comes when chatting shit about nerd stuff over a pint or two will help for a short time, I will come running. My deepest condolences.