Television: Doctor Who, "Heaven Sent"

Ugh.

Okay, so at the end of "Face The Raven," the Doctor was sent via a teleportation bracelet to . . . Basically this place designed to force him to confess stuff? It's a place filled with his worst fears, and in order to get them to stop, even temporarily, he has to confess something each time. And the whole thing is related to this idea of a Dalek-Time Lord hybrid or something? A creature that can either save or destroy the world (or universe or whatever)? And the whole thing also involves the Doctor looping continually through this scenario, though he goes a bit further into the future each time.

Make sense?

Does it even matter whether it makes sense?

Throughout all this, too, the Doctor has a kind of projected Clara writing on a chalkboard. He calls her "Teacher," and she's really just the other side of himself as he tries to reason out what's happening. But he projects her as his conversation partner, yet apparently cannot remember her voice, so she's forced to write on the board. We don't see her face either.

The end result of all this, which was incredibly belabored and not at all interesting, is that the Doctor finally gets free of this place/loop (and the viewer finally gets free of this awful episode) and realizes, or declares, or however you want to think of it, that there IS no hybrid because Daleks don't, er, do that. Hybrid, that is. And so this thing that has the power to either save or destroy is him.

Of course it is.

It's hardly a revelation. How much more interesting would it have been if it had been Missy or something? (I do wonder if she had anything to do with the bracelet and loop—she'd surely know what the Doctor most fears, right?)

There have been episodes that don't hold my interest. There have been episodes with glaring holes in the logic. But this one had to be one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who I've ever seen. My husband put it this way: "I think Steven Moffat has crawled up his own ass and come out the other end." I'm not 100% sure what the "other end" is, but yeah, that about sums up how I feel about the whole thing.

I'll concede that, had I watched more closely, maybe it would have made a more favorable impression? But try as I might, I simply could not devote all my energy and attention to this episode. It was so . . . bad. I started out watching and then felt myself curling into a fetal position as a form of self-preservation against it. I was forced to resort to games on my iPhone to distract my brain from being bombarded by the awfulness of it all.

Next week the Doctor is home on Gallifrey. Will he save it or destroy it? How much do we really care either way? Under other circumstances, I'd think it was super cool to have Gallifrey in the mix. Now I'm just worried it'll be another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad episode. Kick a dog a few times, the dog gets boot shy. Just sayin'.