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

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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?

But the rooms reset if the Doctor leaves for sometime, but i think if this material is harder than diamond is also hard to regenerate.

Every 100 years the bird (got from the writing in the sand) pecks at the wall, therefore what the doctor is doing is pointless.

• 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?
• 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?

See point above above he bird peckin on the wall every 100 years.

Sorry, still not getting it. The bird and 100 years is just a metaphor, in fact the Doctor every time beats the wall as often as he can. How does this answer my question? And what the Doctor is doing is the opposite of pointless, the problem is eventually solved exactly because he's been doing it for all this time. And if you mean that all other his actions are pointless because of being reset, I still want to know who dug the grave and depending on this why wasn't it reset.

If the moment a new Doctor clone is created the base state for the reset is made. That would solve the problem with the word bird not disappearing from the sand.

But not the Wall which i have two teories:

1)The Wall room is non-resetable

2)The Azbantium is too difficult to be "reseted"

• 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.

The doctor writes the word 'bird' when he is week, each new doctor reads it and wipes it away. When the room is reset the word is written there for him the read.

Both questions stand, why doesn't the word get reset as everything else and why the way to the roof opened exactly when the Doctor saw the word. As initially, when the Doctor first arrived there (which is, as i understood, the state that the rooms are supposed to be reset to) there couldn't be any such word, as there was no Doctor yet to write it.

• 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?
• 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

• 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?

Perhaps the dial was meant to extract the confessions out of the Doctor

• 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.

• This is point four: Too many skulls. In the water the Doctor sees many thousands of skulls. He emerges from the water in the interior of the castle. Billions of skulls being added would eventually inundate the castle. The depth of the water within the castle walls can be estimated. 7000 years in the future gives the point at which we join the story. If he survives in the castle for a week, 52 skulls a year will be deposited. 7000 x 52 = 364,000 skulls

This amount does not rise above the water in the interior of the castle. If he adds the same amount until breaching the crystal wall he will add 104,000,000,000 skulls. The castle would overflow with skulls. Even if the skulls fall exterior to the castle the 'angle of repose' applies. Complicating factors such as currents, storms and the depth of the water exterior to the castle all lead to the same conclusion: too many skulls.

You have to remember that skulls don't last forever. They'll eventually turn to dust, allowing for newer skulls to take their place.