“As you come into this world, something else is also born. You begin your life, and it begins a journey towards you. It moves slowly, but it never stops. Wherever you go, whatever path you take, it will follow...”
In the opening narration of “Heaven Sent,” the penultimate episode of Doctor Who Season 9 and the show’s best episode ever, the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) seems like he could be referring to death. After all, what is more present in our lives than the looming certainty that those lives will eventually end? It’s a key question that the Doctor wrestles with over the course of the masterful hour of television that is “Heaven Sent,” too: As he finds himself trapped in a giant labyrinthine castle, he is chased by a slow, monstrous, lumbering figure known only as The Veil, which threatens to murder him unless he confesses his darkest secrets.
