History Headscratchers / DoctorWhoS35E11HeavenSent

** Possibly the dials are normally used to create a captive copy of a Time Lord's personality, whose intellect can be transferred into the Gallifreyan Matrix upon their final death. Each dial would need a communication-link to Gallifrey to do this, and the true nature of the dials would be kept secret from all but the highest-ranking Time Lords to ensure that link couldn't be exploited to hack the Matrix. When Gallifrey became Time Locked and trapped in its pocket universe, the link to the Doctor's dial got blocked by the crystalline wall, so instead of having to work his way into Room 12 just once, the Doctor had to ''punch'' his way in. The castle, Veil, and mechanisms were all custom-generated to drive him into Room 12 and goad him into entering; the fact it took him several billion tries was an unintended consequence of the blockage being there. By the time he managed it, his confession dial had been brought into Gallifrey in the same way that the white-point star diamond got ''out'' of the Time Lock for "The End Of Time", and had been adjusted so that it'd construct yet another copy of the Doctor's body for him to occupy there as he stepped through the link, instead of dumping his disembodied mind into the Matrix.

** Possibly the dials are normally used to create a captive copy of a Time Lord's personality, whose intellect can be transferred into the Gallifreyan Matrix upon their final death. Each dial would need a communication-link to Gallifrey to do this, and the true nature of the dials would be kept secret from all but the highest-ranking Time Lords to ensure that link couldn't be exploited to hack the Matrix. When Gallifrey became Time Locked and trapped in its pocket universe, the link to the Doctor's dial got blocked by the crystalline wall, so instead of having to work his way into Room 12 just once, the Doctor had to ''punch'' his way in. The castle, Veil, and mechanisms were all arranged to goad him to the point where he was capable of doing so over and over again, no matter how long it took. By the time he managed it, his confession dial had been brought into Gallifrey in the same way that the white-point star diamond got ''out'' of the Time Lock for "The End Of Time", and had been adjusted so that it'd construct yet another copy of the Doctor's body for him to occupy there as he stepped through the link, instead of dumping his disembodied mind into the Matrix.

** Possibly the dials are normally used to create a captive copy of a Time Lord's personality, whose intellect can be transferred into the Gallifreyan Matrix upon their final death. Each dial would need a communication-link to Gallifrey to do this, and the true nature of the dials would be kept secret from all but the highest-ranking Time Lords to ensure that link couldn't be exploited to hack the Matrix. When Gallifrey became Time Locked and trapped in its pocket universe, the link to the Doctor's dial got blocked by the crystalline wall, so instead of having to work his way into Room 12 just once, the Doctor had to ''punch'' his way in. By that point, his confession dial had been brought into Gallifrey in the same way that the white-point star diamond got ''out'' of the Time Lock for "The End Of Time", and had been adjusted so that it'd construct yet another copy of the Doctor's body for him to occupy there as he stepped through the link, instead of dumping his disembodied mind into the Matrix.

** 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 copy 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.

* 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 of been [[NakedPeopleAreFunny running around naked]] after taking a dive through the window in order to set up the drying clothes loop.

** Other thought: destroy it, yes, but '''to rebuild it'''. Do a Sailor Moon on that bitch and remake Gallifrey, but less corrupt. Hopefully.

* Moffat is hardly going to have The Doctor destroy Gallifrey again, is he? He wouldn't do that, right? RIGHT?!

* Did Clara's portrait show its actual age, despite the bedroom's reversions? The Doctor judges it to be "very old" when he examines it in the first iteration shown, and a later shot when he's moving from room to room gave a glimpse of a chamber with empty picture frames on its walls. If so, did his later iterations only see an empty frame and a pile of disintegrated canvas dust which isn't a bad reminder of her absence in itself...?

** 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 copy 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]].

* Did Clara's portrait show its actual age, despite the bedroom's reversions? The Doctor judges it to be "very old" when he examines it in the first iteration shown, and a later shot when he's moving from room to room gave a glimpse of a chamber with empty picture frames on its walls. If so, did his later iterations only see an empty frame and a pile of disintegrated canvas, which isn't a bad reminder of her absence in itself...?

** The point to the shepherd boy's answer isn't to give an actual number: it's to express to the king that counting off seconds is irrelevant to the "eternity" concept. ''Any'' finite amount of time, whether an actual second or the eons it takes the bird to wear down the entire mountain, is inconceivably brief from the perspective of eternity.

* The king asked "How many seconds are there in eternity?", not "What is a second of eternity?". And whether you use those special seconds or just plain old seconds, shouldn't the answer to the king's question be the same? There are infinite seconds in eternity.

*** Also, remember what the Half-Faced Man said in Deep Breath? The Doctor, like all Timelords, is stronger than he looks.

** FridgeBrilliance: The wall wasn't actually Azbantium, but a manifestation of ''the Time Lock'' that keeps Gallifrey cut off from the universe. The Doctor's status as a Time Lord has previously allowed him to physically bull his way through Time-based obstacles, as per his ability to move with great effort when time was frozen in "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". In this case, that ability to ''force'' one's way through such barriers was exploited by the Confession Dial to ensure that '''only''' a legitimate Time Lord could break through, albeit in the cruelest way possible.

** FridgeBrilliance: The wall wasn't actually Azbantium, but a manifestation of ''the Time Lock'' that keeps Gallifrey cut off from the universe. The Doctor's status as a Time Lord has previously allowed him to physically bull his way through Time-based obstacles, as per his ability to move with great effort when time was frozen in "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". In this case, that ability to ''force'' his way through such barriers was exploited by the Confession Dial to ensure that '''only''' a legitimate Time Lord could break through, albeit in the cruelest way possible.

* How long would it really take to punch through a wall ''20ft thick and 400x tougher than diamond''? Assuming the rate of the few punches he does, every 2 days...

** Perhaps in the first iteration, the Doctor got as far as the room with the fire, took his clothes off to hang them up, but waited for them to dry and was attacked by the Veil. In no state to get dressed again, he quickly made his way back to the teleport room to create a new clone of himself (who went the same route, found dry clothes already waiting for him, did a quick switch, and avoided being killed there the second time. Then the action loop continued much as we saw it throughout the episode
* Why do some areas seem to reset after the Doctor leaves them, and not others? For instance the room where he drops his eyeglass clearly resets (otherwise the room would quickly become filled with eyeglasses after a few years, nevermind the thousands, millions or billions of years he repeats over), and the same goes for the room where he drops the flower petal. And of course all the blood stains through the castle when he's dragging himself back to the teleporter at the end of an iteration, they vanish too. But on the other hand, the room with the dry spare clothes may or may not reset (it's hard to tell, he leaves his clothes behind in place of the spares, so the room is essentially how it was when he found it), and the skulls always fall into the ocean, building up on the seabed in over the iterations (if they reset, there'd never be any skulls down there). And finally of course, the room with the wall clearly doesn't reset, as that's the whole point of his CloningGambit in the first place.

** Unless this is just an unintential case of a bootstrap paradox?

** Eventually the older ones would disintegrate. Which adds some FridgeHorror, since even that massive mountain of skulls is only a fraction of the number of Doctors that have died.

* Gruesome question: if the pile of skulls was already ''that'' deep during the first iteration shown, how did the middle of the castle ''not'' get filled in completely from the billions of additional iterations before the episode's end?

** Other thought: destroy it, yes, but ''to rebuild it''.Do a Sailor Moon on that bitch and remake Gallifrey, but less corrupt. Hopefully.

** He said that the Hybrid would "conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins". If Gallifrey is still in the same condition as when it went into stasis, then the ruins from the final mass Dalek attack would still be there, so maybe he's just going to take down Rassilon's corrupt regime and wind up (again!) the planet's unwilling President.

* Moffat is hardly going to have The Doctor destroy Gallifrey again, is he? He wouldn't do that, right? RIGHT?!