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

:::The Confession Dial seems a rather odd thing to create. Who would want to torture a weakened Timelord whilst in their final incarnation, just so they can upload their consciousness to the Matrix?

::::This isn't the normal operation of a Confession Dial; this particular one was modified by the Time Lords.

*We see that the Doctor has been repeating for 7000 years, so how come the wall he punches has no dents from the past years?

::There are a few bumps on it.  It ends up taking 4,500,000,000 years or so to complete, so 7,000 years wouldn't get very far.

::: This is made evident also in the montage where the Doctor doesn't get very far with the Shepard's Boy monologue until literally tens of millions of years have passed.

*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?

:::: I'm afraid you really weren't, nobody mentioned any kind of alien world, and in the episode there was a wall, not a mountain, and as explained above, there was no real bird, the Doctor simply compared himself beating the wall to the bird pecking a mountain from the fairy tale.

::The story is about how eventually, the mountain is worn away by the bird. Similarly, the azbantium wall will eventually be worn down by a fist.

* 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 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?

::: As for the bird thing, I now think that the Doctor's ashes is what the Doctor's basically become, it's a significant part of him, which can't be reset by the castle, which is why he chooses it to leave a message. And well, also because there's nothing else he can possibly reach at that moment. So no matter if the Doctor leaves the room or not, the word stays and it's blown away by the wind later.

::The word "Bird" does not disappear because the room reset *before* the doctor wrote the word. At 44:29, as he is crawling toward the teleporter, he says, "The room has reset." The room is already ready to go, in the same state it was in originally, *except* that the teleporter doesn't have enough energy to operate. The Doctor writes the word "Bird" in the sand, gives the teleporter some energy with his body, and the teleporter activates and does what it originally did, making a Doctor copy. The new Doctor copy emerges seconds later, so there hasn't been enough time for another reset, and the word "Bird" is still there.

* 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?

::Regeneration can be halted in various ways, such as stabbing both hearts. Alternately, the woman had reached the end of her regeneration cycle.

::Shobogans also live on Gallifrey and do not regenerate (this was established in The Deadly Assassin, so it is valid to bring up here). He may have spent time with Shobogans, since the barn he grew up in seems to be outside of the Citadel.

*The doctor was in the Confession Dial for 4.5 billion years. Where was the Confession Dial itself during all this time? Not on Gallifrey, because Gallifrey is gone from the universe during our time - it was moved to the end of time. The Confession Dial must have been somewhere else, and then when it got to the time where Gallifrey is located going "the long way around," somehow someone moved it to Gallifrey?

*What was the Confession Dial doing for 4.5 billion years? Just sitting in the desert, in that place where the Doctor emerged and met a little boy? And no one tampered with it during that time? Nor did its walls get worn down by weather, nor was it buried as continents moved, mountains turned to ocean floors, and similar geologic changes occurred?

::Considering this whole thing was a setup by the Time Lords, it naturally follows that they intended for him to end up on Gallifrey, so it's likely that they ensured the the dial would end up on the planet, if not specifically the region. Furthermore, with it being Time Lord tech and all, maybe it was kept in some kind of pocket space or something for those 4.5 billion years, keeping it safe from the physical changes you describe.

*Why would the Doctor bury a cryptic message to himself underground, rather than a very informative, explicit message that was easy to access?

*Why did the Time Lords make it difficult for the Doctor to figure out what he was supposed to do? It was only by accident that he figured out that he was supposed to tell secrets to the Veil, because he accidentally confessed "I'm afraid of dying." If he didn't happen to say that, out loud (and very oddly), he wouldn't have known, and the Veil would have just killed him.

*Why would the Time Lords have put a creature in there that would probably just kill the Doctor? Then they'd never find out anything.