Doctor Who S9 Ep11 Heaven Sent Review:
I was highly critical of last week’s episode, maybe a little overly so but considering it was such a big episode it really disappointed me, but I don’t care too much in light of Heaven Sent which is one of the best episodes of Doctor Who in the Mofatt era.
I criticise Mofatt quite frequently for his various tropes, but when it comes down to it Mofatt can pen a quite brilliant script, I mean this is the guy who wrote Blink and Girl In The Fireplace, he is an incredible capable writer when he wants to be and boy did he want to be when he gave us Heaven Sent.
Now okay it has some of the sort of superficial cleverness that Mofatt loves, but superficial cleverness is still a kind of cleverness and when done this well it doesn’t feel like Mofatt patting himself on the back for being so clever.
As great as Mofatt’s script is, it certainly is not the star of the show, leave that for Peter Capaldi. Heaven Sent is already a pretty strong contender for being the best Doctor Who episode since Capaldi became the Doctor, but what is for sure is that it is Capaldi’s best Doctor Who episode.
He basically is on his own for the whole episode, Clara pops up for a full ten seconds, but otherwise it is all Capaldi. At various points of Heaven Sent it occurred to me that although I really quite liked Matt Smith if it had been him rather than Capaldi it would have been an excellent episode of Who but not one of the absolute all-time greats.
Capaldi just brings such a beautiful blend of alien weirdness, charm and utter sadness to this episode and he is just consistently brilliant throughout. However great the script already was his performance elevates that bit more and I think anyone who doubted Capaldi’s status as one of the all time greatest Doctor’s won’t be after this episode.
The single best thing about season 9 of Doctor Who has been its risk taking, the way it has deviated from the old formula of the show. Now at times it hasn’t worked perfectly but it has always been interesting and from the opening minutes of Heaven Sent it is clear that Doctor Who had gone one further this year and was going to deliver something totally and utterly unique.
My initial guess was that the Doctor had created this place for himself as some sort of punishment from the guilt he is feeling as a result of Clara’s death. I really thought I was on to something when we got things like his clothes being by the fire and I would have been perfectly happy with that being the twist but actually I think Mofatt came up with something that we bit better.
Not only is what he came up with very clever in the way that it ties together the various clues and brings back things like the Doctor’s confession disc but it sets up the finale in a way my twist wouldn’t have done particularly well.
The episode also shines a more positive light on Face The Raven, not that most of you probably loved it. As earlier mentioned this season has been very different to every other season of Modern Who and killing off the assistant in the third to last episode is unheard of when it comes to Modern Who, but what it means is that we can actually get an episode where we see the Doctor work through his grief and it once again makes Heaven Sent a totally unique episode of Who.
I was also happy with the amount of Clara we got in this episode. I would have been fine if she didn’t figure at all, not that might have felt a little bit strange, but just having here there to give a short pep talk of sorts to the Doctor was a good usage of Jenna Louise Coleman and it was just another excellent scene in a long line of them.
I can’t really praise Heaven Sent enough, I haven’t even mentioned the montage yet which was once again a just fantastic scene or how dark this episode is compared to what we usually get from Saturday primetime on BBC 1. Ultimately though Heaven Sent is just a perfect episode of Doctor Who and has maybe restored my faith in Mofatt.
A+( giving it the absolute highest grade possible might be a little but over the top and I may come to think that it was just an A grade episode but in this moment I just think that it is an astonishing episode of Modern Who and one of the best.)
