N128 Heaven Sent

Likes:

• The Nightmarish dreamscape, oozing dread and impending doom, reminiscent of It Follows.
• The Doc’s scheme to lure the Veil to one extreme of the castle and then bomb it to the other to buy time to do stuff. I do the same with my newly walking, clingy son – I dump him at one end of the house, then leg it to the other to eat my dinner. It buys me about 12 seconds (he’s surprisingly speedy, even when I’ve barricaded his path and set traps).
• The terrifying, fly-ridden, Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come villain.
• Satisfying Groundhog Day loop.
• This, Deadly Assassin and Waters of Mars (the only non-Christmas Who episodes without a guest companion?) are so, so good, you wonder why there aren’t more solo adventures.

Beefs:

• Was the hybrid stuff a red herring? The ‘Nothing is half-Dalek, the Daleks would never allow that,’ is balls – the Daleks have compromised on their purity a bunch of times in Classic and New Who.
• Over Billions of years, surely the skulls would have broken the surface of the water.
• The science of breaking through something stronger than diamond with your fist seems total bollocks. Surely you would need Azbantium to break Azbantium? At least if he’d used the shovel, or even got in a few more punches instead of monologuing, perhaps he could have shaved off several million years. In fact, he could have given Mr Cloak the runaround and bought a whole 82 minutes to bash away at it! Or at least write something more useful than BIRD (how abouts, ‘GROUNDHOG DAY – ROOM 12 – HIT WITH SHOVEL’). And there’s always more confessions – surely the Doc has loads of teenage pranks to fess-up.

Summary: After the catastrophic offering of the previous episode, Heaven Sent, minor nitpicks aside, is a Phoenix arising from a puddle of poo. Bravo.

Rating: 4.9/5 underwear changes required during this darn scary episode. Code Brown!

Hey WhoBackWhen. Let’s Rock this new year off right with Heaven Sent. One of, if not the episode most people think of when talking about the 12th Doctor. And for good reason. Yes, the whole confession dial thing confuses the bejeezes out of me but there is so much great in this episode (if you don’t look at it from too far away)

Capaldi did this episode pretty much on his own. To have one character on the screen alone for nearly an hour and be riveting the whole time is pretty damn impressive. His performance was spectacular and all over the place. From scary to witty to broken, he absolutely crushes it on all fronts. His mental trips into the tardis were always a welcome relief as they usually let us catch our breath from the heaviness of this episode. The “villain” was fairly generic but visually cool, as were the underwater skulls.

They did a great job on the small level, repeated lives bit with every fitting together well and an epic conclusion. That being said, on a larger scale it didn’t work great. I’m very tired of hearing about the Hybrid stuff and the confession dial purpose or logic just misses the mark for me.

Overall, I really do love this episode and it ranks amongst the best of Capaldi’s whole run. Despite its flaws I give it a 4.6 out of 5 random wandering desert Galafrayian kids. Till next time. Rock on!