Doctor Who: The Hybrid finally reveals itself in the epic Heaven Sent Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! At last! The Doctor is on Gallifrey. And what an epic journey to get there. Two billion years of punching his way, Kill Bill-style, through that 20-ft thick wall – 400 times harder than diamond. This is truly how you "get up off your arse and …
And while this older Doctor is being more badass than the rest (up to and including imagery that looks like it fell out of a Terminator film), he also gets some wonderful one-liners to play with. Like, hey, hell is just heaven for bad people. I also like the whiplash change in pace for a tight story acted, mostly, by one person carrying a forty-odd minute show single-handedly. Well, him and a ghost Clara and a bunch of cogs.
This older doctor? More badass than the rest? I fear you're not looking far enough into the past.
Capaldi's currently just about younger than William Hartnell was at the end of his tenure in the role, and not a lot older than Jon Pertwee was when he left. Both of them were (relatively speaking) somewhat badass from time to time, as it happens - and you'd've guessed they were both a fair bit older than Capaldi currently is. You could argue that with a middle aged badass Capaldi in the title role, Doctor Who is returning to its roots...
(and as for badass in recent times - well, Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant's versions of the Doctor both scored very highly in that regard. As did the War Doctor.)
Admittedly, the boy Matt Smith excelled as the Doctor if you ask me. Aside from all that, this latest episode classes as "Boffo, a good one".
Capaldi did well - nearly an hour, acted almost entirely solo. Not perfect, but it worked out well. Very little about it grated or irritated, and I can't wait to find out what happens next.
(My confession: I don't recall seeing any Doctor Who episodes on first broadcast before Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning's time. Yep, I'm about a decade younger than Capaldi.)
Well... I have been highly critical of this season so far... very few highlights in what has been a mediocre and dull build up.
But what an episode... carried entirely on the back of Capaldi who seemed to relish finally getting his chops into something meaty.
Great acting, decent writing, great directing and some nice one liners... the Tardis as a place to think reminds me of the Mind Palace from Sherlock... and I sniggered a little at that. But it was handled effectively enough.
At moments i could have sworn I actually heard Tom bakers voice such was the gravitas and finesse of the delivery... perhaps a bit of audio jiggery pokery too. Sent a little bit of a shiver down my spine when I heard it... or thought I did.
I did however think that it was spoon fed to the audience quite early on that it was the doctor leaving stuff for himself to find... scrapes of blood on the floor, shovels, clothes and the very old painting of Clara. I made the ending somewhat less than it should and could have been.
I'm not sure if one great episode makes up for all the mediocre and bad ones so far this year... and for once... I was not disappointed to see Clara for a few seconds. Knowing that she's dead soothes me and I really hope that don't pull a Ewing and he finds her in the shower in the morning... although I think they'll probably save that for the Doctor XXX porn parody.
I think there were two shovels, one in the corridor and one in the garden and I don't think he took them away from those two places. There was also the painting of Clara and the "I'm in 12" written on the ground in the garden which were two clues which didn't reset too. How did all of these things get there in the first place and why didn't they reset? Perhaps after realising what was happening in one of the first times around he left these clues in the right places which would mean from then on he knew he would repeat the same behaviour until he got through the wall.
Why would Time Lords carry their own personal hell around with them not knowing what it was, who told Ashildr to teleport him inside it, and why hasn't the confession dial got any other Time Lord to Gallifrey?
But on the whole one of best episodes ever.
Oh, and maybe the first time he climbed out the moat he left his clothes to dry and went round in his birthday suit...
>>"Why would Time Lords carry their own personal hell around with them not knowing what it was"
Well firstly, it's a device designed to get and record all of someone's truths - for other time lords it may not manifest as a "Hell", or at least not quite as horrific a one. The Doctor is extremely secretive and has far more serious secrets than most people. I imagine you need pretty extreme measures to get him to start telling you them, even if it's for posterity. Secondly, I don't know that I would ever describe the Time Lords as nice. They designed the Confession Dial to do one thing - record all your final confessions for posterity before it finally kills you. Probably no other Time Lord would keep restarting themself by messing with teleport equipment in some clever way. Probably no other Time Lord would even try, once they worked out it wasn't a loop and they were just going to go round and round for an eternity of suffering. So for most people, it would be a case of appearing in a suitable scenario, telling all their secrets and breathing their last. One Time Lord might find themselves with a long lost close friend they'd want to confide in, another (co-operative) Time Lord might just find themselves in a big study with lots of blank books to write their memoirs in. Who knows, but the Doctor did say it was personalized for himself.
The episode was entertaining for sure but definitely not great. The major problem with this one is that it has giant problems sitting in plain sight. If the creature stops whenever the doctor speaks a truth which has never been spoken before then saying that he's scared during the second run wouldn't have worked anymore. So eventually the doctor would have run out of truths to tell.
And there's also the problem about resetting rooms which apparently clean up dropped flowers, fill up dirt holes yet still leaves writing in the sand completely alone.
It was entertaining, yes, but there were too many illogical twists kept in plain sight for me.
>>"The episode was entertaining for sure but definitely not great. The major problem with this one is that it has giant problems sitting in plain sight. If the creature stops whenever the doctor speaks a truth which has never been spoken before then saying that he's scared during the second run wouldn't have worked anymore. So eventually the doctor would have run out of truths to tell."
That rather depends on whether the creature is comparing it to things that it already knows or if it works of a simple principle of whether the subject still has things to confess.
IF true == subject.confession() {
environment.reset();
self.begin_pursuit();
} ELSE {
subject.kill();
}
The latter is actually more logical as it's not going to know if what the subject tells is some profound confession or the price of tea. It must have some method of determining such from the subject itself. So the IF...ELSE is the more likely scenario. You simply haven't thought this through.
>>"And there's also the problem about resetting rooms which apparently clean up dropped flowers, fill up dirt holes yet still leaves writing in the sand completely alone"
It's made clear that the rooms only reset after a period of time. So iterations of the Doctor can and would see elements left behind by his predecessor, e.g. the writing, the wet clothes... Remember, it is NOT a time loop, it's one sequential process with the Doctor being recreated over and over in normal time.
>>"It was entertaining, yes, but there were too many illogical twists kept in plain sight for me."
The episode itself actually suggests the answers you think are illogical.
Do you think Moffat knows the ins and outs of MUDs? :)
After two billion years there's something timely wimey going on as the castle and its contents are still standing. Even if we look just at the non-resetable things that he leaves behind, the painting and the writing are still there after all that time.
Nice idea of what other Time Lords' confession dials could be, BTW.
He seems to straddle Pertwee and Baker (oo-er). He goes for his Tom Baker voice when he wants gravitas, but the velvet coat, and even the shirt in this one (not ruffled, but the detail on the front was suggestive), is very much a Pertwee thing.
At times he even seems a bit Peter Cushing.
... and even better than the last one!
Capaldi really gets to show what he's capable of doing with the part in this episode, even more so than with his excellent anti-war speech previously or his comments to Asildir, reprised in this episode "If you were any part of killing her and you're not afraid, then you understand nothing at all. So understand this, I am The Doctor and I'm coming to find you and I will never, ever stop" (as I mentioned last week, just what he said about the Quantum Shade...)
I was wondering as the episode went along if this was some massive exercise in self-flagellation cf the Dream Lord in "Amy's Choice" where he says there's "only one person in the universe hates me as much as you do", ie himself, but it turned out to be even more sneaky than that and I'm annoyed that I couldn't remember the Bird story (even though I recently re-read Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men which also mentions it), but that just made the revelation even better.
I did guess where he ended up when I saw the Castle in the Confession Dial (bigger on the inside) and I loved the "I came the long way round" comment.
So, Who is Me? Or is Me the Hybrid and not Who? (And Who's on First Base?! Sorry...!) all will be revealed (WITHOUT SPOILERS, PLEASE!) very soon...
PS I also loved the line "I'm nothing without an audience" with a quick break of the fourth wall as Capaldi glances towards the camera and us :-)
>>"PS I also loved the line "I'm nothing without an audience" with a quick break of the fourth wall as Capaldi glances towards the camera and us :-)"
Actually, that is the one moment in the episode that I really hated. I loathe arch little asides to the audience. The writer thinks they're being clever exactly when they're not.
Other than that, a great episode for me. I guessed early on that he was inside the Confession Dial in some manner. "I am in 12" and the way the rooms jumble around was a fairly straight-forward reference to his different incarnations which leant support to the Confession Dial theory. But I couldn't work out what "bird" meant until I heard the whole "bird / eternity" fable and I didn't see the wearing away of the diamond until you were pretty much meant to be working it out. Episodes where I can't work out what is happening but it all makes sense with hindsight (as opposed to some episodes where you can't work out what's happening just because the writer throws in random changes to the scenario to get out of the corner they've put themselves in), our my favourite types of episodes.
I'm sorry to see Clara go as she's one of my favourite characters. But I like the way they gave her. Great episode.
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