I've only just watched it on iplayer and there is something i dont understand why didn't the wall he took billions of years to smash,reset like everything else did?

It was a puzzle to test him and that was the solution to earn his escape. I assume anyway.

Because there would be no more Doctor Who if it did .............Great question though! You're definitely on the ball!

This was one of my first thoughts upon finishing the episode. I then thought that if everything kept resetting to how it was, then how could there be a sea of skulls from previous Doctor's who had died in the castle - as surely the skull would simply reset itself.

I think it literally was only the castle and all of its components that got reset. That any outside elements were susceptible to lasting damage and change. What were these outside elements...
- The stars. The Doctor was looking up at an ever-changing sky. That even when the castle reset back to its default time and time again, time didn't reset with it. So each time a copy of the Doctor arrived, he arrived that much later than the previous one had...and so time really did pass throughout that story, and the Doctor was technically trapped for billions of years (so are we now on Gallifrey billions of years in the future?).
- The skulls. If everything was resetting itself, then why did the skulls keep piling up under the sea? As the Doctor isn't part of the castle, the skull didn't reset...they do just pile up inside the device, and it's only the device that resets itself.
- The diamond wall. Which is presumably the 'way out', the door that connects the Confession Dial device to the outside world - and briefly appeared to be a visible door on Gallifrey. I'd say that it similarly isn't a part of the device, and so doesn't reset itself. Like The Doctor, it was placed in there or something.

-

And of course the remaining question in all of this... who created this elaborate trap? Who forced the Doctor to come to Gallifrey the long way around? At a guess I'm inclined to say Missy... she spoke about the Hybrid in her last appearance, and would likely have been frustrated to see The Doctor save Clara and abandon her on Skaro. It'd explain nicely how the Veil was formed from the Doctor's childhood nightmares (which Missy is likely to know more about that most people if anyone), it'd explain why there was an almost gloating painting of Clara in the castle too, whilst the bigger-on-the-inside nature of the dial's technology attributes the trap to a Timelord of some description. All of this stuff that's just happened has been part of Missy's "brilliant idea" that she spoke about.

Of course I could be entirely wrong too

More concerning, who put the first set f wet clothes out to dry....

The Doctor we followed wasn't the first time he had done this he said 7000 years in the future so it had already happned millions of times ( I assume it took about 1 day each time)

So those clothes were left by the last Doctor.

The very first one could have run around in the buff we know from 11 that it wouldn't bother him.

But why didn't the clothes reset and vanish like everything else.

I think somehow the timelords - trapped/ lost after the doctor saved them - found a way to save themselves which involved getting that doctor back to gallifray. Ashildr took the Dr's confession dial off him so when he was transported he was sent into his own dial - timelord technology. The veil was from his own nightmares, as was the idea of digging / gardening which he hates. No one put those things in there, it was all of the Doctor's own making. And as for who made the Dr go the long way round - well he did! If he had confessed who the hybrid was and where he would have got through the wall straight away but he chose not to. The truth would have set him free from his prison, but he chose to stay locked in rather than reveal it.

Here is a spoiler filled article.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...11-heaven-sent

I think there were a few conveniences in that which won't necessarily be explained beyond 'because I say so'.

I'm hoping next week we get a deeper explanation of how this all happened - how exactly did the Doctor's confession dial contain a portal to Gallifrey which is still trapped in a pocket universe.

So how many times did the doctor have to revisit the castle then. Judging by the number of skulls, thousands. I'm sorry but I'm not buying it.

By the end it was in the trillions.

He spent billions of years doing it and each time took about 1 day.

Not necessarily. If whatever he was in was travelling at close to light speed then time contraction would kick in. Being close to a sufficiently strong gravity well might also have a similar effect.

You could ask the same about the billions of skulls.

I think the easiest answer is that outside the "castle" and the centre spire aren't rooms that were part of the system, and therefore aren't reset by the machine (including the teleport room and the crystal room - they were both techo-rooms with differing architecture). Only rooms on the castle ring reset.

The stars moved time did pass maybe not to the outside world but from the POV of wherever he was.

From what we saw it must have been around one day for each go.

It ended 20 Billion years into the future so that means it went on everyday for 20 Billion years (Give ir take a year or two)

Now it could be like Narnia that to rest of the world only a few mins had passed.

Awesome

The whole place did not reset, just certain rooms. He even says about rooms resetting in the ep.....

I wonder if that's actually the case as in the rest of the world aged billions of years whilst the doctor was trapped inside his own confession dial?

Given that the confession dial is its own world and we have no idea if time passes there in the same way is passes in the normal world.

For all we know the Doctor could have been tapped in the dial for a few hours earth time. Which makes more sense because if 50 million years have passed then to be honest nobody will give a flying toss who the Doctor is, if they even remember him. I imagine after a few million years even a time lord will have been presumed dead and after 50 million he'd be nothing but a foot note in history.

And Adhildr. He said when he made her immortal that she was immortal 'barring accidents'. As in she could still die. Just not from illness or old age but if say she ended up being shot in the heart then she'd die.

So we're also supposed to believe that she managed to live for 50 million years (plus a few centuries before trapping the doctor) without getting herself into any accidents. And still remembered the Doctor. She has said several items that she remembers things thanks to her diaries. Now keeping hold of them for a few hundred years to enable herself to remember the doctor and Clara (and she didn't actually remember Clara, she just knew that she had met her before thanks to her diaries). And keeping hold of them for 50 million years is completely different. Given that She couldn't even remember her own name after a few hundred there's no way she'd still remember the doctor after 50 million years. Immortal or not.

So I am going with the theory that time passed differently in the confession dial than in the real world. And 50 million years hasn't passed.

I'd say we'll find out for sure on Saturday but we all know Moff does as he pleases so it could just remain a glaring plot hole never addressed.

Wasn't it 20 Billion years by the very end.

Either way I agree time passed in the castle/confession dial but not in the real world or only a few hours or days at most passed (Like Narnia)

Does it really matter how much time passed in "the real world"? This is Doctor Who! It's irrelevant, surely?

My understanding wasn't necessarily that it was a portal to Gallifrey - it was that the confession dial was on Gallifrey, and had been abandoned to the desert. How it ended up on Gallifrey, I presume we will be informed in the next episode.

Usually I'd say yes because he has the Tardis. But this time yes it does matter. Because it's a sequence of events. Not just the Doctor flying about from one time period to the next in his box.

If millions of years have passed then everyone who was around at the time he was trapped will be dead including the people who wanted him trapped in the first place. The Doctor will be nothing but a footnote in history to the entire universe.

I'd stick with the idea that it was literally only the components of the dial that has the ability to reset each time. The Doctor*, his clothes, his skull, and for argument's sake the diamond wall were never reset each time because they were things all inside the dial, rather than part of the dial itself.

*as in the teleport produced a new copy of the Doctor each time the dial reset itself, but the Doctor himself never actually reset.


Sorry to shorten your message, but good points made. I guess the hardest thing to wrap your head around is the concept of a whole world wrapped inside the Confession Dial (especially when the slightly unconvincing CGI at the end depicted what looked like a castle popping out of a 3D book). But with Timelord technology involved, the concept of 'bigger on the inside' is something I think these three final episodes could potentially be exploring...
Face the Raven - a whole street hidden in an alleyway in London.
Heaven Sent - a whole reality hidden in a pocket-sized device.
Hell Bent - a whole world (Gallifrey) hidden somewhere?

It's fair to assume time passes differently in different worlds (as was also hinted at with Pete's World back in Series 2) so a billion years in one world doesn't equal a billion in another. I guess it all hinges on whenabouts Hell Bent ends up being set...and of course whether Moffat delivers a more concise explanation or whether we have to reach our own conclusions on the matter.

I touched upon this in my post over in the main episode thread, but thought I'd elaborate a little more here, because the feeling I get is that people are trying to look far too deeply into what happened to the Doctor physically, when I'm not convinced that anything actually did at all.

My basic theory is that the entire time the Doctor was inside the confession dial was a virtual experience. I mean, even the castle itself was clearly designed to be an obvious manifestation of the dial's inner workings, what with all the cogs turning and the building itself twisting around in a circular clock-like motion. To me it just screamed that whatever was happening was inside a virtual world. Given the nature of that sort of technology on Gallifrey, such as the Matrix or Missy's Nethersphere, that just seems like a far more likely explanation for where the Doctor was.

Then there was the timeframe involved. I mean, over two billion years or so? Even if we accept that the Doctor would have needed two billion years worth of days to crack through that wall (because that is a LOT of days, right there) if the castle and the technology inside were actually real then it would all have turned to dust long before. Whether or not you accept that the energy of the Doctor's death and rebirth could have self-sustained for that long, the machine that it used surely could not.

So for me, all this leads to the most likely answer being that the Doctor's 'energy' or 'soul', whatever you want to think of it as, was trapped inside a virtual world within the confession dial, experiencing a repeating simulation until he was considered worthy of making it through to Gallifrey. And as such, the Doctor that arrived on Gallifrey was the original one, never truly having been destroyed and recreated at all. Well, no more than regular Transmat usage does to a person every time they use it anyway.

The painting of Clara was also never reset, it's why it was so old looking and and placed there as clue for the Doctor, I bet.

The Doctor's a time traveller who's been from the beginning of the universe to the very end, no-one would know if he was missing because they'd assume he's in another time somewhere.