Examining Heaven Sent’s Perceived Plot Holes

Guest contributor Matthew Clarke attempts to piece it all together.

I’m a long time reader, first time poster. I absolutely loved Heaven Sent and thought it was a very bold but successful move for Doctor Who. I’ve been trying to get my head around all that transpired in the confession dial. I’ve read lots of comments and people’s views since and I think I’ve just about got it straight in my head (but due to the nature of interpretation, there’s always room for manoeuvre). If you recognise one of your ideas please feel free to say. I am in no way trying to plagiarise: I’m simply to arrive at a solution to some of the perceived plotholes in a brilliantly executed episode!

To begin, the Doctor we initially see and follow isn’t the first one to arrive. However, he is the first one to reach the diamond wall. He’s ‘been’ there for 7000 years and we can assume he has slowly but surely worked out how the castle works. We’re simply seeing the version that’s finally arrived at the most efficient way to reach the diamond wall. From the skulls, we can see this has taken many thousands of trial-and-error attempts of unknown time-length.

With regards to the clothes being there, I read one comment that postulated there may have been one version of the Doctor that reached that room and got caught by the Veil as he was waiting for his clothes to dry (hence their presence in the room). I loved this idea! But it would explain how they, eventually, came to be in that room. They were not there initially; they were introduced at some point by one of the many thousands of Doctors, not necessarily the first iteration.

This also got me thinking about his notebook. If we go down the route of Doctor being caught and leaving the clothes by the fire; the notebook would still be in his pocket, albeit wet. As the clothes didn’t reset, the notebook wouldn’t either. So eventually the Doctor would stumble upon his old notes at some point and eventually add to them. He would have had the whole castle worked out in the notebook. This would help him to realise he was in a repeating loop. Granted, there’s no definitive answer to everything that was in the notebook, but I found it interesting that they chose to show him writing in it.

The rooms resetting has been a big point of debate in some places. From what I understand, an explanation for the diamond wall room not resetting is that the Doctor was only ever intended to go there once. So there was no need for it to reset. Some comments have pointed to that fact that if the interrogation failed, the process begins again in order to get the answer; but in this case, the will of the Doctor was under-estimated. Also, we only have the Doctor’s assumption that all rooms reset. He doesn’t know the full workings of the place. However, we do know the rooms can’t reset if he’s in them. This brings me to the teleporter and fireplace rooms

The teleporter room and fireplace room didn’t reset as the Doctor, in some way, was still in them. There’s two ways to explain this. One involves DNA. Assuming Time Lords have some sort of genetic makeup, the rooms would have detected the Doctor’s DNA (the skull, on his clothes) and still thought he was there. Hence they didn’t reset. This theory falls down, however, when you consider we leave traces of DNA everywhere we go and therefore, if this were the case, no room he’d been in would reset.

This led me to my second theory: energy conservation. The Doctor postulates that he’s in an energy loop. In all the known universe (and hopefully confession dials) energy is neither created nor destroyed. When the rooms reset, they went back to their original ‘settings’. If there was an object that wasn’t in the room originally, I wouldn’t be ‘absorbed’ by the room, as the energy had to remain constant. One possible explanation is that the rooms, in order to remain constant, don’t reset the presence of external objects as this would upset the energy balance; everything is made of energy. They are left alone, almost as if they are the remainder to a calculation. The rooms could have reset, but the external objects are left alone.

What’s started out as a comment has grown in length to an article. Obviously, the beauty of Moffat’s writing is that there is always room for manoeuvre. It’s open to interpretation, and that’s the fun of it! Either way, nothing will beat that thrill, towards the end, when you realise what the Doctor has set up and is doing.

Thanks for reading. And be sure let me know your views on these elements in the comments.