What time is Doctor Who

“Heaven Sent” is not only the best episode of Doctor Who this season, it’s easily one of the best hours of television produced in the now decade-long revival era.

Peter Capaldi goes (largely) solo for this penultimate episode.

As Doctor Who adventures go, it’s as stripped down as they get.

Earlier this month (November) Moffat reassured Doctor Who fans that the series’ future is not in doubt. The character hunting The Doctor is known only as The Veil, and his cloaked appearance suggests a deeper secret to his identity.

Of course, this all feels a bit more complicated than simply being a conflict between The Doctor and his own darker nature. The episode is not only the first episode to lay the vast majority of its time on just one character; it is also an episode in which the Doctor literally solves his life-or-death situation by punching it. Repeatedly.

At last! The Doctor is on Gallifrey.

It’s official: Clara Oswald has left the building, and Clara’s final season of Doctor Who is coming to a close-making her, depending on how you chart it, one of the longest-running companions in history.

The Doctor will spend most of this installment alone, but he’ll eventually face a creepy being. Old friend Rigsy (Joivan Wade) had a mysterious tattoo on body that marked him for death via raven.

Watch Steven Moffatt discuss Clara’s death on Doctor Who Season 9. And it’s telling how empty he is now without her, too, when it’s the vision of Clara (a brief, touching return by Jenna Coleman) that finally pushes him forward to “win”.

On the plus side, this complete lack of any idea of where to take Clara allowed the show to essentially rework her as showrunner and head writer Steven Moffat saw fit. The Doctor is a tortured soul, now as much as ever, so it’d basically be impossible to ignore the magnitude of Clara’s loss in The Doctor’s psychological journey. Being a hero is exhausting – being a hero when you have to sacrifice yourself over and over again for millennia takes a toll on him that he might not quite recover from. Tonight viewers were thrown headfirst into a mystery with only the Time Lord taking to the fore. As I mentioned before, this is the kind of solution that would seem anathema to the Doctor’s methods, but it really isn’t. Hell, I can’t wait, either way.

Without much to build up to, Clara’s main focus in season 9 so far has been a sense of recklessness in her traveling.

“Episode of 11 is sort of a one-hander”, Moffat said to EW.com of “Heaven Sent”.

Throughout the episode he keeps talking to Clara, whose death he witnessed in the previous episode.

Not a reference or a callback, but an occasion worth marking all the same: this episode marks the first use of the word “arse” in an episode of Doctor Who. But with Capaldi at the helm as a darkly triumphant Doctor, I’m really enjoying the vividly weird direction of the show these days.