History Headscratchers / DoctorWhoS35E11HeavenSent

** If putting the clothes there is part of the reset then it's fine. You could assume the system scanned his clothes upon arrival and made sure copies of his clothes were there in case he fell in the water. The doctor leaving everything as it was is simply typical [[SuperOCD Time Lord OCD]], but essentially unnecessary.

* Let me see if I've got this right: The Doctor made the Confession Dial, then someone or something made a deal with Ashildr to trap The Doctor inside his own Confession Dial, and then The Doctor broke through it into Gallifrey. Who's plan was this? Did The Doctor set up this insanely elaborate plan and then erase his memory in order for it to work? If he knew how to get to Gallifrey in the first place, why set any of this up? Or was this some plan somehow set in place by The Timelords from within the Time Locked Gallifrey?

* So how did the first cycle (which wasn't shown onscreen) take place? It seems like The Doctor would of had no clues to guide him and would have been [[NakedPeopleAreFunny running around naked]] after taking a dive through the window in order to set up the drying clothes loop.

** It's not the Gallifreyan sky. The Doctor states early in the episode that he's only a light year from earth so the stars in the sky are basically earth's stars, not Gallifrey's.

** The shooting script and the next episode reveal that when he says "me" he actually means "Me" -- aka Ashildr. '''But''' if he truly believes her to be the Hybrid, why does feel the need to keep that a secret when he'd have an even better bargaining chip by allowing them to capture her and perhaps execute her, which would kill two birds with one stone -- vengeance against her for what she did to him and Clara (even if she didn't intend to hurt her, she had no problem betraying him) and satisfaction for the Time Lords. A hefty reward might be granted him for getting the Hybrid finished off, after all.

* The rooms in the castle reset themself after a while, but it's never explained if the same happens to Veil. However, we pretty much have to assume that the Veil does reset as the rooms do, because if it doesn't, every time it catches the Doctor he would have to confess a new secret to it. And this wouldn't work with the whole billion-year loop plot, because of two reasons: 1) When the Doctor first encounters the veil, he would probably try to confess the same (fairly) harmless secret, but the Veil would only accept it once, so in the subsequent loops the secret wouldn't work, and the Doctor wouldn't figure what stops the Veil, thus changing the whole loop. 2) Even if the Doctor somehow manages to remember the previous loops, it's not like there are billions and billions of secrets only he knows that he can confess to the Veil. So when he inevitably runs out of secrets the loop would again change. But since the loop we see remains unchanged, we must assume the Veil always resets itself, forgets about the previous loop, and always accepts the same two confessions from the Doctor. But if that's the case, it raises the question, why did the Time Lords come up with such an inefficient way of extracting a secret from the Doctor? If the Veil keeps on resetting, and the Doctor can always feed it with the same couple of confessions, the Time Lords will never get the confession they want out of him.

I'm confused as to what "Heaven Sent" means and refers to in the context of the episode. The phrase "heaven sent" means "providentially opportune" and refers to something that's a blessing, but there's nothing like that in the episode here. What exactly in the episode is "Heaven Sent"? Aside from the Doctor sending himself through the whole thing, I can't think of anything that could possibly be considered heaven sent in that episode. Can someone please explain the title for me? What does "Heaven Sent" refer to? I know "Hell Bent" refers to an angry, off-the-rails Doctor (Moffat's words, not mine), but what about "Heaven Sent"?
* "Heaven Sent" refers to the Doctor. How many times was his arrival providentially opportune to others? How many worlds has he saved? To some races and individuals, he's a trickster and a demon, but to others he's an angel. And then people who owe him their lives heartlessly betray and/or torture him. In his DarkestHour, none of those people who see him as good, who ostensibly care for him, are there for him. (See "Nobody Loves the Doctor" above.) And the result is that he ends up trapped in anguish, grief, and rage, and mentally off-the-rails...as if ''Hell bent him''. Perhaps the way that "Gallifrey Falls" and "No More" were meant to be said together as "Gallifrey Falls No More", these titles describe the Doctor over the course of this StoryArc: "Heaven Sent, Hell Bent".
* It's called {{irony}}.

** Probably because even though that is likely the truth, the context of that answer implies that is the Doctor. Like the earlier point mentioned, there's no way Gallifrey would let him out of that Confession Dial after that admission and would've certainly destroyed it to prevent him from getting out. Which, when you think about it, is a FridgeBrilliance on the part of Ashildr; "How do I make sure nobody gives up my identity as the Hybrid? Use a name which implicates the witness instead."