YMMV / Doctor Who S35 E11 "Heaven Sent"

• Award Snub:
  • Despite receiving near-universal acclaim for his performance, with more than one reviewer predicting acting award recognition, Peter Capaldi was snubbed by the BAFTAs, the only major juried non-regional UK award the series is eligible for.
  • Due to a change in how the series is funded, this became the first Doctor Who episode whose script was submitted for Emmy Awards consideration and Capaldi also made the "long list" ballot for lead actor in a dramatic series, also a first for the show, but again there were no nominations.
  • This episode lost the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) to the Jessica Jones (2015) episode "AKA Smile".
• Awesome Music: The Shepherd's Boy, the piece that plays over the scene of the Doctor breaking the wall. It's so good that it even replaced 'A Good Man?' as the 12th Doctor's theme.
• Bizarro Episode: The episode has been pretty much described as this by the producers themselves: an episode with (for all intents and purposes), a single speaking role, the Doctor, with Peter Capaldi being tasked with keeping an episode moving and interesting virtually all on his own. Amazingly, it works and, while "bizarro episodes" tend to be head-scratchers that rarely add anything to the overall story, it ended up being one of the most dramatic episodes in the show's history, of vital importance to the Doctor's Character Development (as well as being the middle chapter of a trilogy, though stylistically it resembles neither of the episodes on either side, which is remarkable when one considers the same writer and director created the third episode), and is usually seen as, if not just Capaldi's best episode, one of the best episodes of the entire series to date.
• Critical Dissonance: This episode was almost universally praised by professional and fan critics, and by the fanbase itself. The Appreciation Index (a panel that gives a rating based on how much they enjoyed a broadcast), however, was one of the lowest in the history of the modern era of Doctor Who. And, despite critics predicting a BAFTA for Peter Capaldi for his nearly-one-man performance, he was ultimately snubbed when the nominations were announced.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The Doctor saying he originally fled Gallifrey because he was scared — which, given the nature of the confession dial, would appear to be the truth — isn't as popular a motivation with fans as the one he usually claims, which is boredom. Part of this is because the show will likely never reveal what he was scared of, and if it did, it would never live up to the hype of something so awful to make the Doctor flee everything he ever knew up to that point in his lives. On the other hand, it is more or less consistent with "The Sound Of Drums"'s suggestion that he never stopped running after looking into the Untempered Schism.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • We only see bits and pieces of the Doctor's life in the confession dial. What else did he do while he was in there? Steven Moffat has confirmed that the Doctor spent a long time (possibly years) on his first cycle through the dial trying to figure things out. At one point, he also painted the portrait of Clara.
  • Did the Doctor spend more time with Clara inside his mind?
  • We see how crazy and desperate the Doctor was at the 7,000 year mark. How unfettered must he have been at the 4.5-billion mark? His "Why can't I just lose!" monologue at that point must have been intense.
• Sacred Cow: This episode has been near-universally hailed as not only one of the greatest post-2005 revival episodes, but one of the greatest Doctor Who episodes, period. Maybe even THE greatest as of 2023!
• Shocking Moments: Maybe you were genre savvy enough to guess the time loop premise partway through the episode and figured that after 7000 years of repeating, the iteration seen in the episode would be the last. But the number of years passed in the montage at the end just keeps getting larger... and larger... and larger...
• Spiritual Successor: With the Twelfth Doctor struggling alone in a strange world against a mysterious adversary, and the world's connection to Gallifrey, this could be seen as New Who's answer to the extended battle between the Fourth Doctor and Goth in the Matrix in "The Deadly Assassin". Especially since both are some of the few stories where the Doctor is absolutely companionless, not counting a group of Time Lords in "The Deadly Assassin" or an imaginary Clara here.
• Unexpected Character: Clara appears as a figment in the Doctor's Mental World, following her death in the previous episode. This fact, along with the cameo appearance by Jenna Coleman herself, was successfully kept secret prior to broadcast.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Possibly a textbook example, given it's all about bereavement and begins with a sombre monologue by the Doctor talking about how death begins to chase a person the moment they are born. Try getting a kid to sleep after hearing that... Not to mention the Doctor's injuries... or the small matter of him committing suicide billions of times.

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