What possessed Moffat to dredge up River Song, one of his worst writing failures of the worst season of the blighted Matt Smith era?

The attempts at humour fall flat throughout the entire episode. The actors often look like they are waiting for applause but getting silence.

When it comes to procuring stories for Doctor Who, I can't see why the BBC allows the tenderer to award the contracts to himself. If Moffat was working for any of the companies I have worked for and did what he does, it would be an immediate sacking, minimum. The lack of a competitive process for selecting stories really shows with this complete doozey from the hands of this past master of schmaltz masquerading as sci-fi.

I would give it a zero if I could.

Hell Bent is a tribute to our pervading culture of decline. The Timelords are us. The Doctor is what we used to be. Clara and Ashilda are the expropriators of our inheritance.

In all sincerity, Heaven Sent is a piece de resistance of Moffat-style timey-wimey writing. When it works, it is great sci-fi.

I am taking a point off the part as it advances the re-write of Who history that I'm not that comfortable with as a long time fan. I am referring to the the whole question of why the Doctor became a renegade timelord. In Classic Who, he was just a naughty boy. In Nu-Who it has been steadily reworked to have cosmic significance. Thus we get the Dalek-Timelord war, the War Doctor, now the Dalek-Timelord hybrid. I know that the Doctor's significance to the Timelords and the Timelords' presence increased over the journey of Classic Who, especially the later Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras, but we are talking orders of magnitude. As well, the increased back story and participation of the Timelords in those Classic Who eras actually took the show down a peg or two. It was interesting that with the Eccleston era, Nu-Who began by adopting the position that the Doctor was the last of the Timelords, a plot stance that I interpreted (approvingly) as a calculated eschewal of one of the plot elements in Classic Who that had gone awry. However, Nu-Who producers have since Eccleston successively chosen to revisit the Timelords saga and on steroids at that.

Nevertheless, in spite of my concerns, Heaven Sent is excellent and I await the finale eagerly and in the hope that it can cure me of my misgivings about Nu-Who revisionism.

Not a bad story at all but how many alien refugee stories are we going to get before the writers decide to close the borders? The "refugees" in this episode have a bit of the paternosters about them due to the pre-20th century backdrop and the idea that they could cohabit goes seriously against established character.

I liked the hidden street plot device although it went dangerously close to platform nine and three quarters territory.

The writers have also gone to great lengths to wring every last tear drop out of the Clara exit scene and you can see Capaldi and Coleman are working overtime to try and make it work. Somehow or the other, Sarah Jane Smith's much more simple exit in the Hand of Fear is just so superior to this highly staged, endless goodbye that descends into unashamed mawkishness. Still, many will like this and Nu-Who is by now littered with gushing goodbyes, which means it must work for the ratings.

Even with these misgivings, I am looking forward to the finale as the season over all has been pretty enjoyable.