Heaven Sent

The penultimate episode of this highly enjoyable series is a unique one. It’s unique because Peter Capaldi is the only person in the episode. I’m not really counting Jenna Coleman’s cameo appearance because then it takes away the shine of my previous statement. To have just the Doctor and no one else is rather brave thing to do and would require a good plot to keep everyones attention for the extended 55 minute running time. With this episode, Steven Moffat becomes the fourth highest credited writer in Doctor Who.

Peter Capaldi has put in some great performances since he became the Doctor and even when the episodes haven’t been the greatest, I have thought that Capaldi’s performances in the episodes were what saved them. Watching Heaven Sent, its clear that he has been drastically under rated. He gets to show us what he can do when he doesn’t have anyone to act against.

The Doctor spends the episode in a castle where there is the slowest creature following the Doctor. It manages to catch up with the Doctor and the only way that the Doctor can escape it is by telling it a truth. There are moments where the Doctor ‘escapes’ into the TARDIS and I thought that these brief scenes were good because it broke up the pace in the castle and just gave a different feel to the episode. This is where we see the back of Clara who is writing on a blackboard and this is the closest that the Doctor comes to interacting with someone.

The Doctor has to find room 12 and this is where the episode really feels like it heading towards something and there is some made up diamond type thing between the Doctor and what at first I thought was the TARDIS and he punches his way through and it takes two billion years to punch his way through which is a crazy thing but the repetitive shots of his time in the castle getting quicker and quicker helps to build up to the ultimate moment where he breaks through and where he ends up in the place that I think most people knew would make an appearance at some point.

The creature that is chasing the Doctor turns out to be the Hybrid which has been mentioned throughout this series and the Hybrid kills the Doctor leading to the rather horrific point that the skulls at the bottom of the sea all belong to the Doctor and are the times when the Hybrid has killed the Doctor.

When the Doctor makes it back to Gallifrey this was a very important moment because after 10 years of thinking that Gallifrey was never going to be visited again that we have a series finale that will be set on it and not in a retrospective way as has been the case before. This will be the first time since Arc of Infinity that a story takes place on Gallifrey and I am really excited that we have got round the big roadblock that Russell T Davies set up a decade ago. Some people are calling this a classic. I don’t think that it is but it is certainly the best story of the series and in years to come this may come close to that classic tag but I think that if the final episode has potential to be the best story of the series but time will tell.