Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Heaven Sent

You are exploring the Discontinuity Index, a place where any details or rumours about unreleased stories are forbidden.
Please discuss only those whole stories which have already been released, and obey our spoiler policy.

This page is for discussing the ways in which Heaven Sent doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

Remember, this is a forum, so civil discussion is encouraged. However, please do not sign your posts. Also, keep all posts about the same continuity error under the same bullet point. You can add a new point by typing:

* This is point one.
::This is a counter-argument to point one.
:::This is a counter-argument to the counter-argument above
* This is point two.
::Explanation of point two.
::Further discussion and query of point two.

... and so on. 

• The obvious one. If all the rooms in the castle reset - how is the Doctor able to slowly wear down the diamond wall over multiple incarnations?

At a guess the resetting stops when the Doctor 'dies' and begins again when he 'arrives'. So the settings are as they were when he begins the loop again (all the rooms would have been rest by then to their 'normal' settings). The diamond wall room is occupied when the Doctor dies so the resetting stops when he has done some damage and stays that way until the loop stops with him inside it again. You may ask why, if this is true, do the bloodstains on the floor dispensary, to which I can only answer that maybe the floor is independently self cleaning?

• 1) who put the very first costume in the fireplace room? or the first 12th doctor just put off the wet one, left it and went on naked? otherwise there'd be no extra costume for the next 12 and why didn't it disappear when the room was reset? even if it's not supposed to be gone because it's like a part of something alien-not-castle-stuff, still the question stands - who put the first costume in the room?
• 2) what was the point in taking the panel from the floor, writing on it and burying in the garden? and if all the rooms except the wall one get reset, why the garden and the floor weren't reset? The garden was only reset to the grave being dug up back again, but that's not what it was like when the Doctor first got there. Or in fact he wasn't who dug it, the Time Lords were, so the dug up grave was a default? Why? To show him the way? But why so complicated?
• 3) if the rooms are being reset all the time, why the word 'bird' stayed on the sand for a while for the Doctor to read it, and was gone later? And why the castle started moving and opened a way to the roof when the Doctor saw this word? The Bird clearly means no good for the Time Lords, more like vice versa.

1. The castle in the state presented in the episode is made up out of a mixture of bread crumbs left behind by the Doctor (and for some reason not reset to the default), bread crumbs(?) that are a default part of the castle and just random stuff and it's not always obvious which is which. What is clear, though, is that the first time (and possibly a few more after the first one) the Doctor is transported there differed from the sequence occurring ad nauseum in the episode. At what point did the Doctor set up the scenario as we saw it unfold? How much of it was actually set up by him and what parts were already part of the default castle? Also, how was the transporter activated the first time?
2. Why, for God's sake, doesn't the Doctor figure out something better to hit that wall with than his hands?

Put yourself in his position. If you were trapped inside that room with the Veil coming at you, how else are you going to go back and get that other thing to hit the wall with? Furthermore, I doubt using that other thing would actually get him out of that area faster

1. At the end we see everything took place inside a confession dial, but was it the Doctor's confession dial? If so, why was this what was inside it and shouldn't he have known?
2. Once on Gallifrey the Doctor casually reveals the secret he was so insistent not to reveal to the Veil just moments earlier. So why did he go through the torturous process of creating and sacrificing billions of clones?

Dialogue states he knows of only the legend of the Hybrid and he did state, just before he punched through that hard wall, that he would no longer be confessing to the Veil his knowledge about the Hybrid - which of course included the confession we heard at the end.