Heaven Sent

I think I spent the first 45 minutes of Saturday’s Doctor Who, Heaven Sent, trying to work out exactly what was going on. It looked fantastic, Capaldi was brilliant (even if he seemed to be morphing into Tom Baker at times) and I even liked the score (Murray Gold throwing a snippet of Beethoven’s Seventh at Prokofiev and catching the debris). I had fathomed some things out such as the Doctor somehow managing to leave clues to himself but it wasn’t until the last 10 minutes or so that the whole picture fell into place whilst stirring some sort of deeply buried memory from the back of my mind: "How long is a second in eternity?"

Now, initially, I thought this was some biblical reference. Possibly this was because I first heard the story in a Sunday school class but given that the young priest that ran it was more fond of magic tricks, Germanic folklore and Ray Harryhausen movies than anything as dull as the bible I should have throught better of it but the story of the bird pecking away at a mountain struck a chord with me. I looked it up and it is recorded as the Brothers’ Grim faery tale KHM 152: The Shepherd Boy (Das Hirtenbüblein) in which a king quizzes a shepherd boy, renowned for his wisdom. The passage comes from the king’s third question:

Sprach der König: "Die dritte Frage lautet: wie viel Sekunden hat die Ewigkeit?" Da sagte das Hirtenbüblein: "In Hinterpommern liegt der Demantberg, der hat eine Stunde in die Höhe, eine Stunde in die Breite und eine Stunde in die Tiefe; dahin kommt alle hundert Jahr ein Vöglein und wetzt sein Schnäbelein daran, und wenn der ganze Berg abgewetzt ist, dann ist die erste Sekunde von der Ewigkeit vorbei."

The King spoke: "The third question is: how many seconds are there in eternity?" Then the shepherd boy said: "In Lower Pomerania there is the Diamond Mountain, which is three miles high, three miles wide and three miles deep; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn, then the first second of eternity has passed. "

Actually, in the German it uses eine Stunde meaning an hour’s walk which will take me about three miles if I’m not in a rush. The bird, in the case of Heaven Sent, is the Doctor trying to punch his way through the diamond wall. Personally, I think he would have been better off hitting it with his shovel. Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor might have managed this a bit quicker as he was fairly handy in a fist fight but I suspect he would have just punched the Veil’s lights out and had done with it.

Thanks to the BBC managing to stick great big spoilers in the TV paper the big reveal of the Doctor getting back to Gallifrey wasn’t such a surprise but the Doctor announcing that “The Hybrid is Me” was a bit of a novelty. However, does he mean that he himself is the Hybrid or does he mean Ashildr who refers to herself as “Me”? Thanks to another bit of a spoiler in the Next Time trailer we also know that Maisie Williams is in the series finale.  I thought avoiding spoilers was a case of ignoring the internet, not the bleeding episodes themselves? Oh yes, the Doctor now says “Arse” – I’m sure that would have offended Patrick Troughton’s Giddy Aunt.

Anyway, having enjoyed the series so far I’m split between whether this one  or the Zygon story is my favourite. Heaven Sent is certainly the most original idea and also one that I think will still stand up to repeated viewing. Whether it will go down as well with the casual viewer (or at least those that are not as well versed in Grimm tales) is another matter. However, I’m going to call it as a classic.