Physician, Heal Thyself: An Overanalysis of "The Night of the Doctor"

"I'm not half human on any side."

Is it a burden to always be right about Doctor Who?  No, not really.

Okay, I wasn't the first to guess it.  And Paul McGann's Twitter slip-up made it kind of obvious.  But it was Moffat's careful wording about the casting that made it kind of obvious that he was trying to hint at something big.  But I was still so pleasantly surprised when I woke up this morning to find Paul McGann in the prequel, as a part of me still believed it was too good to be true:

In 1996, Philip Segal tried to relaunch Doctor Who with Doctor Who:  The Movie.  As I've explained before, the movie was a dumbed down disaster, but not an ounce of the blame belongs to McGann.  However, McGann was redeemed with the truly brilliant New Eighth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Audio, that let us know how good a show Doctor Who would have been with McGann at the helm.

Today, Steven Moffat further proved that point, with this little surprise.  We were promised this minisode would come out this coming Saturday, but I guess they pushed it up a few days to put it out exactly on Paul McGann's birthday.  What a birthday present:  the release of the episode that does in 7 minutes what Segal failed to do in 90.

One of the biggest questions fans have had since the launch of the new series is:  How did the 8th Doctor regenerate?  We assumed, for a long time, that he regenerated from McGann into Eccleston, but now we know that to be false.  So now we finally get to see how 8 regenerated into True 9.  Will we somehow get to see how True 9 regenerated into 9, allowing us to know how every single regeneration happened?  Well, unless Eccleston's lying, he's not in the special.  Still, they managed to regenerate Colin Baker into Sylvester McCoy without the cooperation of Colin Baker, so I guess anything is possible.

The planet the Doctor lands on is the planet Karn.  Even I forgot about this freakin' planet that only appeared in the Fourth Doctor serial, "The Brain of Morbius."  Basically, it's a planet that's been colonized by the Time Lords.  That's more or less all you need to know.  I didn't realize this when I first watched the minisode.  Understanding that these women are Time Ladies makes the whole thing make a lot more sense.  The Sisterhood of Karn are the keepers of the Sacred Flame which produces the Elixir of Life, which can be used to give someone immortal life.  Hence why they could bring the Doctor back after his crash.  They are semi-autonomous from Gallifrey itself.  Hence why they not only have Time Lord technology, but they have also improved upon it.

When the Doctor drinks the elixir that the Sister has made for him, he rattles off a list of names of friends to say goodbye to:  Charlie, C'Rizz, Lucie, Tamsin, and Molly.  If you're wondering who all of these people are, they're the Eighth Doctor's companions.  But here's the awesome thing:  they're all companions from the audio adventures.  This is literally the first time that anyone on screen has acknowledged that the audio stories are, in fact, canon.  The BBC has stated publicly that they are, but nothing on screen has ever confirmed that until now.  Nobody has ever crossed the audio or the novels over into the TV show.

Also, the list specifically ignores the Eighth Doctor's one and only on-screen companion, Grace Holloway.  Considering how my recent trip to Denver Comic-Con taught me how Daphne Ashbrook, who played Grace Holloway, is a blatant fame whore, I'm quite glad they slighted her.  You can read more of my opinions on Ashbrook in my write-up about Denver Comic-Con.  Hell, Molly and Tamsin spent about as much time with the Doctor as Grace did, and Tamsin fucking betrayed him!

Are there flaws in this minisode?  Sure.  I thought that the Doctor's insistence on not getting involved in the Time War was overcome a bit too quickly.  In fact, the whole thing moved a bit fast.  It's a pretty significant story to be told in 7 minutes.  But you have to give Moffat credit, as there wasn't much else he could do.  He could never make a full length episode out of this.  Who would want to watch a 60 minute long 8th Doctor episode in 2013 other than the die hard fans?  And it's not really even a 60 minute idea.  Ideally, this is about a 15-20 minute story, but there's really no venue for Moffat to tell the story in that length.  He told it in the format he could get away with, and did as well as he could.

Also, Moffat wrote the 8th Doctor the way that Moffat writes the Doctor, not the way that the 8th Doctor has been written in the past.  The dialogue is very Moffat-y, and really feels like it belongs in Matt Smith's mouth--maybe Tom Baker's--but not Paul McGann's.  The line about going to the back of the ship because the front crashes first is the kind of funny, silly line you'd expect from the 11th Doctor.  And this particular exchange doesn't sound anything like what we've heard from the 8th Doctor in the movie or any of the audio adventures:

OHILA: No. We restored you to life, but it's a temporary measure. You have a little under 4 minutes. 

DOCTOR: 4 minutes? That's ages. What if I get bored or need a television, couple of books. Bring me knitting.

That kind of sarcasm isn't very 8-ish.  But I think it can be forgiven because it's so damn funny.

This episode also addresses something I've been wondering for a while:  can the Doctor age within a particular regeneration.  Presumably, the Doctor's first regeneration, the Hartnell Doctor, had to have spanned from his birth to the end of "The Tenth Planet."  That means his childhood and adolescence were all a part of that first regeneration.  So he must have aged significantly within that regeneration.  But can he continue to age and come to look older within a regeneration?  The 11th Doctor has been alive for about 300 years now, and he still looks 12 (although the make-up department looks like they're trying to age him up a little, but certainly not 300 years worth).  This minisode suggests it is possible, because 8 looks 17 years older than we last saw him (as that's how much older McGann really is).  But, more significantly, the ending shows a young John Hurt as True 9 that was actually taken from stock footage, which suggests that True 9 aged very significantly within his regeneration.

It also raises one question:  If True 9 aged that much within his regeneration, then how freakin' long was that regeneration?  We all know the Doctor lies about his age.  How old is he, really?

The question people haven't been asking since the new series came back but which they should have is this:  Why would a pacifist join a war?  Sure, the 6th Doctor had a pretty dark side, and the 3rd Doctor karate chopped people, but by and large, he is a peaceful man.  Why would he become a soldier?  Apparently, it's because he realized that both sides had become so equally evil that he had to put a stop to it once and for all.  He made a very reluctant choice, and came to regret it.  But did he?  It seems he regrets what the war did to him, but understands, reluctantly, that what he did in the war was necessary.

We just don't know, yet, what exactly he did.

Moffat has fallen in love with these little minisodes, going all the way back to "Time Crash."  In addition to the ones that are put out online, the DVD Boxsets are peppered with these little jewels.  Moffat seems to love writing short stories about the Doctor. Some of them, like "Time" and "Space" are incredibly clever.  Some of them, like the Pond Life series, tell us some really interesting information.  Some of them, like "The Battle of Demons Run:  Two Days Later" provided some information that should really have been put in a full-length episode for it to make sense.  And some of them, like "He Said, She Said" are so pointless that I feel bad for the animals who were killed to make the gelatin to make the film that these pointless little stories were shot on.

But "The Night of the Doctor" is the masterpiece of Moffat's minisode obsession.  Never before has a minisode provided such crucial information.  When looking back on the history of the series, "The Night of the Doctor" is going to need to be seen as equal in importance to any full length episode, because it shows us one of the regenerations, something that is fundamentally important to the history of the Doctor's life.  Furthermore, it's a very good regeneration episode, and it should always be seen as an important part of the series.  If "The Day of the Doctor" turns out to be a complete disappointment, then I'll just be able to watch "The Night of the Doctor" on repeat for 90 minutes and pretend that's the 50th Anniversary Special, and I'll be sufficiently mollified.

Beyond the End of Time Itself: An Overanalysis of the New Trailers for "The Day of the Doctor"

RASSILON: We will initiate the Final Sanction. The end of time will come at my hand. The rupture will continue until it rips the Time Vortex apart. 

MASTER: That's suicide. 
RASSILON: We will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be. 
DOCTOR: You see now? That's what they were planning in the final days of the War. I had to stop them. ("The End of Time Part 2")

This weekend, the BBC released another full trailer for the 50th Anniversary Special, "The Day of the Doctor," as well as a short clip from the episode, both of which are above.   If you remember, I already gave my analysis of the first trailer they put out a few months back.  Then the BBC put out this teaser trailer that everyone but me felt the need to dissect and analyze.  Personally, I think trying to learn anything from a trailer that has literally no footage from the episode is fruitless.  It's a cool looking trailer, but it tells us nothing we didn't already know.  But this trailer is an actual trailer that gives us some new information, so it's time to dive in.

If you ask me, it seems pretty clear that this episode is, first and foremost, the sequel to "The End of Time."  "The End of Time" told us how The Time War ended, and this episode is going to show us in greater detail.  I'm not surprised that fans speculated that this episode would be titled "The Time War." I think we're finally going to see what really happened.  Perhaps, we're going to see the very moment when the Time Lords and the Daleks were destroyed.

The 10th Doctor, the 11th Doctor, and True 9 are somehow brought together for this episode.  But the 10th Doctor says in the trailer "Why are we all together?  Why are we all here?"  That means that they didn't just stumble upon each other, or seek each other out by choice.  Something forced them together, a direct violation of the Time Lords' First Law of Time (which they broke when they felt like it).  Furthermore, there's something that never dawned on me before:  If they can meet True 9, then the time lock is broken.

In "Journey's End," we learn that the entire Time War is "time locked," meaning nobody and nothing should be able to get in or out of the time period in which the war happened.  However, Dalek Caan found a way to break through, yet it cost him his sanity (not that Daleks are really sane to begin with).  Then, in "The End of Time," Rassilon found a way out, but it was not easy to pull off.  True 9, as far as we know, only existed in the Time War, and his regeneration almost certainly happened in that war.  This means that either the 10th and 11th Doctors, along with Rose and Clara, are going to be breaking into the time lock, or True 9 is breaking out.  My money is on the former.

It's never been known when and exactly how the Doctor regenerated into the 9th Doctor.  Up until "The Name of the Doctor," it was assumed that Paul McGann's Doctor regenerated into Christopher Eccleston's, but now we know that's not true.  That leaves us with 2 regenerations we've never seen on the show, and a lot of wiggle room as to when things happened.  However, there's one important clue:  In the beginning of the episode "Rose," the 9th Doctor checks himself out in the mirror, and it looks like it's for the first time.  "Ah, could've been worse. Look at the ears. "  So True 9 presumably regenerated into 9 moments before the events of "Rose."  I think it's fairly safe to assume that his regeneration occurred because of the event that caused him to end the Time War.

It's been said that Eccleston was approached to come back for this special, but that he turned them down.  I've been wondering about this:  was True 9 supposed to be in the script, or was he added into the script because Eccleston turned down the special.  Is True 9 playing the role that Eccleston's 9 was going to play?  This would have required Moffat to completely ignore the mirror scene I mentioned earlier, but perhaps the special was supposed to be about how Eccleston's 9 ended the Time War.  Regardless, it's going to be very difficult to do this story without Eccleston, if this is the story I think it's going to be.  How do you not show True 9's regeneration into 9 if Eccleston refused to come back?  Maybe Eccleston is lying, but I doubt it.  He does seem like he's too much of a dick to come back for the fans.  But maybe he's going to surprise me.

The other little clip they released, referred to as "But That's Not Possible!"  Other than introducing a character in the background, who's supposedly going to be named Osgood (I don't feel like unraveling that little puzzle) and who seems to be wearing the 4th Doctor's scarf.  The whole clip seems pretty pointless to me.  It tells us very little.  UNIT (it sounds like Kate Stewart) is showing the Doctor a painting, and Clara sees something that she thinks is "not possible" (a phrase that is used often on Doctor Who and is almost always proven wrong).  I couldn't understand what Clara was shocked by the painting.  My girlfriend said "She saw herself in the painting."  That would be interesting, as the painting is clearly of Gallifrey burning to the ground.  But I'm afraid we're looking at a much more commonplace and tired plot device:  Clara saw the same image in a dream that's in the painting.

Next Saturday, the minisode "The Night of the Doctor" will be released.  The description they've given out says:

"The 50th Anniversary features Matt Smith, David Tennant and a mysterious incarnation played by John Hurt. Only one appears in this mini episode, 'The Night of the Doctor.' But which?"

I'm thinking of the phrasing of this.  "Only one appears in this mini episode."  One of those three?  Or one Doctor?  Moffat said that no other past Doctors will appear in the special.  He said nothing about these minisodes that he's so fond of making.  Furthermore, Paul McGann, the 8th Doctor, seems to have potentially let something slip on Twitter.  Back in October, Paul McGann said on Twitter:

"Spent forty minutes this pm having to imitate Matt Smith’s dramatic delivery in VO. You have been warned….”

After fans got crazy excited, he followed it up by saying:

“I should explain. It was by way of an aural experiment to find out how similar we might sound. We didn’t. And he’s better looking too.”

What the fuck does that mean?  What kind of aural experiment?  For what?  What could that possibly mean?  It sounds like a weird, fumbled excuse that he came up with when he realized he had just said way too much.  Even if Moffat is telling the truth about none of the past Doctors coming back for the special, that doesn't mean that none of them can come back for the minisode.  Plus, he's one of the easiest Doctors to bring back because we know so little about him.  He could have stayed in that regeneration long enough to really, truly age within that regeneration, which would explain the 20 year age difference since the last time we saw him.  You can't really say that about any other Doctor.

I think McGann is in "Night of the Doctor."

Counting to 13 the Hard Way: A Quick Response to Moffat's Latest Hints

Steven Moffat dropped some hints a few days ago about what was coming in the coming specials this year.  First, he confirmed that the Doctor can only regenerate 12 times.  But then he said, regarding the number of regenerations the Doctor's had:

"I think you should go back to your DVDs and count correctly this time...there’s something you’ve all missed.”

Dear Steven, trust me, I did not miss this:

I just assumed that you'd missed it.  And no, I don't have any doubt whatsoever that this is what you're talking about.

I've always noticed this, I just assumed that the writers were choosing to ignore it.  But when the Doctor was shot by a Dalek in "The Stolen Earth," he regenerated, but he siphoned all of his regeneration energy off into his hand, keeping him from regenerating completely.  While this was exceedingly stupid writing, it should count towards his regeneration count.

So now we know that the 11th Doctor is actually the 13th Doctor.  So that means that, as Moffat has confirmed that he will be following the 13 Doctors rule, something in either the 50th Anniversary Special or the Christmas Special will deal with the fact that the Doctor's out of regenerations.

So we deal with the Doctor's end of his regeneration cycle in the next few months.

But if the 11th Doctor is really the 13th, then where's the Valeyard?  The GI said that the Doctor would be known as the Valeyard by the end, but if he really is the 13th Doctor, the Valeyard should have been created already.

Is The Answer in the Question?: A Further Rundown of The Eleventh Prophesy

The Universe is cracked.  The Pandorica will open.  Silence will fall when the question is asked.  The first question. The oldest question in the universe. Hidden in plain sight.  On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely, or fail to answer, a question will be asked. A question that must never, ever be answered.  "Doctor who?"

Above is what I'm going to start calling The Eleventh Prophesy.  It is a combination of three interconnected prophesies given to the Doctor in the course of the three seasons, all of them copied verbatim, their only changes that were made were made to fit them together into one coherent paragraph.  The words have not been rearranged in a way that might cover up a second meaning that Moffat hid in the words.  The first comes from Prisoner Zero, the second from the Teselecta, the third from Dorium.  If you put them together, you kind of get one full prophesy about the entirety of the Eleventh Doctor era.  An entire religion was created with the sole mission of preventing the fulfillment of this prophesy.  Essentially, every single episode of the Eleventh Doctor era, from "The Eleventh Hour" to "The Name of the Doctor" is held together with this one, strong, overarching prophesy.

So let's start taking another look at that prophesy.  Because I thought it had come to a terribly unsatisfying conclusion in "The Name of the Doctor."  But it occurred to me that I might have something wrong.  Maybe the prophesy's fulfillment just hasn't ended yet.  What if we're not done yet?

My biggest problem with "The Name of the Doctor" was that it failed to fulfill The Eleventh Prophesy.  On the fields of Trenzalore, the Doctor was asked the question that must never be answered.  But, the prophesy said that "no living creature could speak falsely, or fail to answer."  As a matter of fact, the Doctor distinctly failed to answer.  I had a problem with that, because I took it from the prophesy that it meant that the fields of Trenzalore were a place that acted like truth serum and forced any person there to answer any question posed to them truthfully.  Clearly, this didn't happen in "The Name of the Doctor."

But there's one thing that can't be overlooked:  "the fall of the Eleventh."  The Doctor did not really "fall" in any way in "The Name of the Doctor."  He was attacked in every part of his timeline, but Clara saved him.  So it's hard to believe that the events in "The Name of the Doctor" were "the fall of the Eleventh."  But I think I was expecting this episode to be the fulfillment of the prophesy so badly that it ruined my enjoyment of it when it turned out not to be what I thought it was.

It became clear at the end of the episode that the title "The Name of the Doctor" was a mislead.  Moffat wanted us to think that we'd learn the Doctor's name in this episode, as that was assumed to be his greatest secret.  Instead, his greatest secret was True 9, who he said didn't deserve "the name of The Doctor."  Essentially, this explains the title of the episode, and Moffat's promise that the Doctor's greatest secret will be revealed, in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with what we thought he meant when he named and teased the episode.  I was pissed because I thought that this meant that he had chosen to just throw out entire sentences of the prophesy and pretend they weren't even there to begin with.  But now I've realized:  just because this was a mislead from Moffat doesn't mean that he's not going to do what we were expecting.  It just means it didn't happen in this episode.

Okay, hopefully I'm still making myself clear.  This is the simple of it:  We all thought that "The Name of the Doctor" was going to be the fulfillment of the prophesy.  It failed to fulfill the prophesy.  But that doesn't mean the prophesy won't be fulfilled.

Credit where credit is due, it was my friend Dawn Gabriel who helped me realize something I hadn't thought of:  just because the Doctor went to Trenzalore in "The Name of the Doctor," doesn't mean he can't go back.  It's possible that this planet does have such "truth serum" properties, but only at certain times of the day, or the week, or the year, or every few millenia.  The prophesy does not say "where no living creature could speak falsely, or fail to answer."  It says "when."  The situation in which no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer might not simply happen in a place, it might happen only at a particular time, most likely a particular time in a specific place.  That time has not come yet.

"The Fall of the Eleventh" is obviously meant to be the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration into the Twelfth.  This could be Moffat lying or misleading us, but remember that sometimes, when we think Moffat's being too obvious, it's because he actually is being obvious.  The best example was "The Impossible Astronaut" where many people guessed River was the astronaut, and many of us said "No, she can't be, because that's what Moffat wanted us to think."  I try to remember that now.  It's possible that, when he says "The Fall of the Eleventh," it really is the "Fall" of the Eleventh.

With Matt Smith's announcement that he's leaving after the Christmas special, it all makes sense now.  There are only 2 more episodes of the Eleventh Doctor era.  One will be the 50th Anniversary special.  We know that that will involve the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors teaming up to fight the Zygons and that somehow True 9 will become involved.  The Christmas Special will be Matt's farewell.  At the end of the Christmas special, the Doctor will probably face the moment on the fields of Trenzalore when he is asked the question and cannot fail to answer.  He will then somehow be rescued from having to say it aloud, but will then regenerate, possibly due to the effect of the answer itself, or from what he has to do to be able to keep from answering.  It's also fairly likely that there is a strong arc from "The Name of the Doctor" through both the 50th Anniversary special and The Christmas Special that will slowly bring us to the Fall of the Eleventh.

What I find fantastic about this is that, if I'm correct, then Moffat has engineered one entire story arc that covers the exact lifespan of one whole Doctor.  One whole Doctor played out one long plot that pretty much made up his entire era.  Season arcs have been tried before, but never has there been an arc that literally ran from a single Doctor's first to last episodes; from regeneration to regeneration.  The slow march towards the Eleventh Doctor's farewell literally started on the first day of the Doctor's life when he first encountered the cracks that were made (presumably) by The Silence to kill him, and heard the first third of the prophesy.  That is a huge and amazing accomplishment, with the one arc being separated into three, equally fascinating sub-arcs, each of which took up one season.  Everything has interconnected perfectly, from the Doctor meeting Amy, to Amy's daughter turning out to be created by The Silence, an Order of the Question.  It wove in and out of the story so much that we almost forgot it was there sometimes, or thought it was about to resolve itself.  And every time we learned that there was at least one more corner we had to go around to finally get to it.

This would mean that True 9 isn't the end of the story, although it's possible that the 50th Anniversary special is so tied in to the prophesy and the overarching plot of the Eleventh Doctor era that Moffat actually thought up the plot for this special before writing "The Eleventh Hour."  Somehow, I think True 9 is the first to last surprise Moffat has in store for us.  Will the last one wow us even more than True 9 did?

It's possible that my faith in Moffat is misplaced and he'll just come up with something that doesn't satisfy the prophesy at all.  But I take back some (not all) of my comments about "The Name of the Doctor" very tentatively, and will reaffirm my complaints if the later specials fail to fulfill the prophesy properly.  Perhaps "The Name of the Doctor" was actually only part 1 of a 3 part answer to the questions we've been asking since 2010.

Or perhaps Moffat just gave up on the prophesy and doesn't care anymore.

You Don't Love Me, You Love Magazines: An Operation Blue Harvest Update

Things have been pretty quiet here at The Horror this week.  It's been a very emotionally taxing week in my life.  But a new issue of Doctor Who Magazine just came out, and it gave us some big information about both the season finale and the 50th Anniversary special.  I should probably subscribe to DWM, but for the time being, a Google News alert for "doctor who" seems to be working just fine.

Although I would like to have as many framed pictures of Matt Smith as possible.
In a totally heterosexual way.

Let's start with the season finale...

The Name of the Doctor

I got this all from Blogtor Who.

Like I predicted, Vastra, Strax, and Jenny are all coming back.  When the episode description said that the Doctor's "friends" would be captured and taken to the fields of Trenzalore, I figured it had to be more than just Clara.

Richard E. Grant is coming back in this episode as a "posthumous" Dr. Simeon, which I think we all know means that the Great Intelligence is the main villain of the episode.  This is further confirmed with a quote that has been revealed from the episode.  "How's the intelligence--still great?" - The Doctor.

Clara's true identity will be revealed in this particular episode.  Does this mean her weirdness is linked to the Doctor's real name?  That might explain why the TARDIS showed Clara the Doctor's real name. It might be a clue that she needed to hear.  We've seen the TARDIS give clues about the future before ("The only water in the forest is the river"), and we know that it can predict the future.  There's no doubt that the TARDIS knows who Clara is, hence why it doesn't like her.  Although it seemed to like her enough to save her...

Okay, so most of that is stuff we already knew.  But here's the bombshell:  Not only will River be there...it's going to be a "post-[L]ibrary" River!  It seems that the word "impossible" means very little on this show.  River seemed to be clearly killed in "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead."  How on Earth has she survived?  One possibility is that she somehow faked her death.  Why that would be necessary is beyond me.  Another possibility is that she hasn't actually given up all of her regenerations after all.  Will we be see a future regeneration of River in this episode?  Or possibly some other time in the future?

Another interesting idea is the fact that, just because the Doctor "saved" River's consciousness in "Forest of the Dead," doesn't necessarily mean she had to die there.  A version of her consciousness could easily have been "saved" even if she wasn't about to die.  Somehow, River found a way to survive, but an echo of her consciousness was still on the sonic screwdriver.  Or maybe her consciousness found a way out of the Library computer.

The magazine also reported that not everyone will make it out of this episode alive.  Hopefully the person to die will be someone relatively inconsequential, like Jenny.  We'll see.  It would be pretty cruel to bring a post-Library River back and then kill her off again immediately afterwards.  But Moffat has said that he has an "endgame" for River.  Who knows what that means.

Now, on to...

The 50th Anniversary Special

Doctor Who Magazine also reported that David Tennant is without a doubt the only Doctor coming back.  I still stand by Rule 1.  It stands proudly as the subtitle of this blog.  It's absolutely possible that Moffat is lying.  Doctor Who Magazine is not opposed to lying on Moffat's behalf.  When "The Impossible Astronaut" was coming out, DWM had 4 collectable covers, each one with a different main character on it:  River, Amy, Rory, and the Doctor.  The headline said that one of them would die, and this time it wasn't a trick.  Clearly, it was a trick.  We all know that the Doctor's escape from the Silence was absolutely a trick.  So maybe they're lying.

However, we have to begin preparing ourselves for the possibility that this isn't a lie.  If that's the case, we all need to remember that David Tennant and Matt Smith paired together in the same episode is an awesome thing!  If we had to choose only one past Doctor to bring back for the special, my number one choice would be David Tennant.  Tennant's cool as a cucumber Doctor will contrast well against Smith's bumbling hipster version of the same character.

However, io9 dug up a brief 19 second video of the filming that clearly shows the crew filming an old fashioned police constable walking past the I.M. Foreman scrap yard at 76 Trotter's Lane.  For those of you who don't know, that's the exact shot that the first episode of the classic series opened with.  It looks like, somehow, we're returning to the beginning.  While Moffat says he wants to move the series forward at all times, the little tidbits that we get from behind the scenes show that that's not entirely true.  The villains are going to be the Zygons, the 10th Doctor will return, and we're going back to Trotter's Lane where it all began.

Even if we don't see the return of any Doctors before Tennant, there's nothing that stops them from bringing back other characters.  Carole Anne Ford, who played the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, and William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton, remain the only original cast members from 1963 that are still alive.  Either of them would be a perfect addition to this episode, especially if the episode is going back to Trotter's Lane.  Someone else has to come back, even if it isn't a Doctor.

You know what would be a great idea for a special?  "The Five Masters."

While I've been saying that I think Susan will come back soon, and I still think there's a good chance of it, I have one concern.  I've recently started to listen to and read expanded universe material.  In Eighth Doctor adventures, Susan meets her grandfather again.  I used to say that we can't claim that expanded universe is cannon, but since there are actually a lot fewer contradictions between expanded universe and television than I thought, I'm starting to view those stories as all cannon.  This is not to say that a return of Susan can't happen without contradicting the Eighth Doctor adventures, I can't imagine that it wouldn't contradict it.  If you bring back Susan, you have to have the conversation about how the Doctor left her behind.

Tomorrow, my least favorite Doctor Who writer is going to be writing an episode that looks really boring.  Let's hope I'm wrong.

Everybody Hates Chris: An Operation Blue Harvest Update

SPOILERS!

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/ninth-time-lord-christopher-eccleston-turns-down-doctor-who-return-8561822.html

It's been announced that Christopher Eccleston will not be returning for the 50th Anniversary special.  Now, this could be just another one of those little lies that makes up what I've been calling Operation Blue Harvest, but this one is probably true.  Eccleston has been very adamant about not wanting to come back since the beginning.

Let's be honest, Eccleston was never really that interested in Doctor Who.  Tennant was a hard core Doctor Who fan from childhood.  Matt Smith had never seen the show when he started, but he watched a lot of past episodes as research for the role.  Eccleston not only had never watched an episode, but refused to ever watch any past episodes to make sure that he wasn't influenced by other people's performance, which is the worst possible way to play the role.  When asked why he wasn't going to put on a more elaborate outfit, like past Doctors, he said it was because his Doctor wasn't going to be a "tosser."

There are some Doctors who, when put up next to each other, are hard to believe that they're the same person.  11 and 1.  6 and 4.  8 and 2.  But when you watch them all in order, there's a kind of natural progression of his personality that makes sense, so you can kind of understand how these different incarnations are actually the same person.  But if you put 9 up against any Doctor, even the ones immediately before and after him, it's almost impossible to believe that he's supposed to be the same person.  Even 10 and 9 don't seem like the same person, nor do they seem like they would like each other.  9 would find 11 insufferable.

Eccleston didn't take the role out of any interest in sci-fi or Doctor Who.  He actually took the role because he wanted to work with Russel T. Davies.  I don't think he knew what he was getting in to.  I don't think he understood that Doctor Who is a huge franchise with fervent fans who devour the expanded universe media and who want to see the past characters and actors come back.  I don't think he realized that anyone would want him to return after he was done.  He also had some difficulties with Davies behind the scenes, which have only been referred to very vaguely.  Hence his early departure.  No matter how much the fans want him back, I doubt he'll ever make another appearance on the show at any point.  There aren't going to be audio stories about the 9th Doctor.  Eccleston isn't interested in being a Doctor for the rest of his life.

However, the fact that Moffat met with him tells us that they're trying to do a big Doctor special.  Especially if Eccleston and the show parted on bad terms, the fact that anyone would consider calling him means that they were very interested in doing the special with multiple Doctors.  I'm frankly shocked that Eccleston even took the meeting.

If it's true that they intend to use footage of past Doctors, its possible that they're shooting to have an Eleven Doctors special after all.  As "The Five Doctors" proved (and, to a lesser extent, the super non-cannon "Dimensions in Time"), you don't need all the actual actors around to make it a multi-Doctor special.  I know there are those who really love Eccleston and want to see him back, but I think fans of the modern Who will be fine with just the Matt and Dave show.  And the classic fans will be happy with anyone from the classic series they can get (well, almost anyone).

And if Tom Baker comes back, then all will be forgiven.

Lies, Damn Lies, and BBC Announcements: An Operation Blue Harvest Update

SPOILERS!

This week it was announced that England's answer to Britney Spears, Billie "Call Girl" Piper, and England's favorite Scottsman, David Tennant, would be returning for the 50th Anniversary special.  Also, John Hurt--whose role as the first guy to die in Alien Moffat once used as a metaphor for childbirth in an episode of Coupling--is appearing for some reason.  Also, Gavin and Stacey star Joanna Page is going to be in the special, which is very exciting news for Joanna's parents, who are probably the only people on Earth who know who she is.

In another announcement, the BBC said that the Zygons are going to be in the special, which is kind of like marketing a major motion picture as a star vehicle for Abe Vigoda.  The Zygons appeared once in a 1975 serial called "Terror of the Zygons," although, if you can find it, I much prefer their appearance in the Eighth Doctor audio drama, "The Zygon Who Fell to Earth."  The Eleventh Doctor also mentioned them in "The Power of Three" as having been responsible for an adventure that he had with Rory and Amy offscreen.  I'll bring you more information about this really obscure villain as the special approaches.

The BBC is suddenly very forthcoming with information, and I still highly doubt that this is all of it.  Billie Piper and David Tennant are the [i]only[/i] ones coming back?  I'll believe that when Daleks can climb stairs.  You can't have a 50th Anniversary special with only two Doctors.  And I'm still not sold on their claims that the episode hasn't begun filming yet.  Tennant's Facebook page is showing pictures of him and Matt Smith after the table read for the special, which they claim just happened.  I still really don't buy that they're cutting it this close, unless the show is going off the air after "The Last Cybermen" and returning with the special for the actual anniversary date itself, November 23rd.  If not, then we're looking at the 50th Anniversary special in about 7 weeks, and that means the episode has to have been in the can for months now.

Here are some possible scenarios I'm seeing:

1.  "The Eleven Doctors":  Even if they can't get all the living actors together (of which there are 8), you could probably still make something called "The Eleven Doctors."  Just throw in some sort of reference to the first three Doctors being trapped in a void somewhere, maybe splice in some stock footage, or have some extra seen only from the back in a Moe Howard wig.  There's a million ways you could do it.  But I'd say you'd need at least 5 of the actors to pull this off.  In "The Five Doctors," for every Doctor they couldn't get, either due to death or stubbornness, they made sure to get one of that Doctor's primary companions.  That wouldn't be that hard to pull off, either.  Carole Ann Ford, Frazier Hines, and Katy Manning are all alive and well and would all probably be up for a guest appearance.

2.  "The Modern Doctors":  Tennant, Smith, and Eccleston.  The three of them could pull off a hell of a special.  Although Rose might get pretty confused having both 9 and 10 around.  I always wondered how, in multi-Doctor episodes, the current Doctor wasn't already aware of what was going to happen because his earlier self already went through it.  You'd also think that all of the Doctors would know what their future regenerations look like from the multi-Doctor episodes.  I feel like a Moffat-written multi-Doctor episode might actually address that (he did address it in "Time Crash).

3.  Matt and Dave:  This is the worst case scenario, that it really is nothing but Matt Smith and David Tennant.  Don't get me wrong, they're my two favorite Doctors.  But you can't really celebrate 50 years of a program with less than 20% of the actors to play the role, and none of the actors from the classic series.  It's just wrong.

In conclusion, I'm thrilled that Tennant is officially coming back (although I had no doubt that he would), but it's not enough.  You need at least one other actor, preferably more (and preferably at least one Doctor from before Eccleston) to make this good enough for the 50th Anniversary.

And of course, the other big question:  If the Zygons are the villains for the special, then how does the Great Intelligence fit in here?

Operation Blue Harvest (Part 2): A Preview of Season 7 (Part 2)

If I've gotten the scheduler to work correctly, this should be posting exactly 24 hours before the mid-season premiere in the UK.  If I haven't gotten the scheduler to work correctly...then I guess I haven't.

Have you ever wondered why Family Guy’s Star Wars episode (with its great Doctor Who reference) is called “Blue Harvest”?  Blue Harvest was the fake production name given to Return of the Jedi to keep fans from finding out about the production.  The ruse got pretty big, with posters and t-shirts for their fake movie.  All of this just to make sure fans were properly surprised.  And it’s not like fans wouldn’t be that dedicated.  In the early days of the show Survivor, there were Internet message boards full of “Survivor spoilers” who went to extreme lengths to find out things about the upcoming season of Survivor as it was being filmed, including a spoiler finding a hotel room in the area where Survivor was being filmed to take photos of the set.  With this level of surveillance in the age of the Internet, and the immense international popularity of Doctor Who, is it any surprise that Steven Moffat would institute his own “Blue Harvest” ruse?  With just about every single actor in the history of Doctor Who denying that they’re returning for the 50^th Anniversary special and the BBC announcing that filming of the 50^th Anniversary special hasn’t even begun yet, we can be pretty certain we’ve established another rule:

Rule 2:  Moffat gets other people to lie.

SPOILERS!!!

The episode titles have been announced recently.  Except for one.  They are as follows:

The Bells of Saint John

The Rings of Akhaten

Cold War

Hide

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

The Crimson Horror

The Last Cybermen

TBA

The lack of a name for the last episode is tantalizing, because we know what Moffat is trying to make us think it’s going to be “The Eleven Doctors.”  More on that later.

The first episode is being called “The Bells of St. John.”  The original title that was released was “Phantom of the Hex,” and then all of a sudden it changed without anyone really having acknowledged that anything had changed.  I mean, seriously, it almost looks like some Internet-wide conspiracy.  One moment, everyone's calling it "Phantom of the Hex," the next minute it's "The Bells of St. John."  I can find no articles even mentioning that the name changed.  "Phantom of the Hex" and "The Bells of St. John" don't seven seem to appear on the same page in any Google search.  Probably means nothing, but I thought it was weird.

The title, "The Bells of St. John," comes from an old British nursery rhyme called “Oranges and Lemons.”  Wikipedia has two versions of it, but the second, longer one has the relevant passage, so I’m only posting that one:

Gay go up and gay go down,

To ring the bells of London town.

Oranges and lemons,

Say the bells of St. Clements.

Bull's eyes and targets,

Say the bells of St. Margret's.

Brickbats and tiles,

Say the bells of St. Giles'.

Halfpence and farthings,

Say the bells of St. Martin's.

Pancakes and fritters,

Say the bells of St. Peter's.

Two sticks and an apple,

Say the bells of Whitechapel.

Pokers and tongs,

Say the bells of St. John's.

Kettles and pans,

Say the bells of St. Ann's.

Old Father Baldpate,

Say the slow bells of Aldgate.

You owe me ten shillings,

Say the bells of St. Helen's.

When will you pay me?

Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch.

Pray when will that be?

Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,

Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Chop chop chop chop

The last man's dead!

If you’re an American (if you're reading this, I’m sure you are) and you've never heard this rhyme before but wonder where you’ve heard those last lines, the first guy to die in “The God Complex” said it to the Doctor when he was tied up in a room with all those living ventrilusquists’ dummies.  (I can’t believe I wrote that sentence in complete seriousness.)

Moffat said that his inspiration in writing this episode was that he felt that it was time for children to be afraid of wi-fi.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Moffat wants to make wi-fi scary.  In an episode, bafflingly called “The Bells of St. John” after being changed from “Phantom of the Hex.”  As strange as this sounds, Moffat has said that he loves to make mundane things terrifying.  That’s something Freud called “the uncanny” (there’s a great paper about this in relation to Doctor Who that I saw presented at a conference).  So let’s see, so far he’s made us afraid of gas masks, old clockwork toys, statues, shadows, dust in sunbeams, cracks in the wall, the creaking sounds you hear in your house, trees, and snowmen.  Wi-fi sounds like something he can do a good job of scaring us with.

Now, they released a prequel for "The Bells of St. John," like they seem to release for everything now. There's no information given in it, other than to suggest, yet again, that something is actually pulling the Doctor and Clara together.  If you feel the need to watch it, here it is, but I guarantee you won't be surprised by the ending:

Now, in regards to the one interesting thing about the trailer, my Doctor Who friend, Brendan Michael, brought the following image to my attention (click to enlarge):

The implication here, of course, that Rose and Mickey seem to be in the same playground as Clara and the Doctor.  Because apparently Mickey and Rose are the only blonde haired girl and black boy playing together on Earth.  But yeah, that does look like Jackie, so maybe that's them.  But I highly doubt this is a clue.  Just a little Easter Egg for the fans to find, just in time for Easter.

The Ice Warriors episode is “Cold War” and is written by Mark Gatiss.  Ugh.  #anyonebutgatiss  It’s going to involve an Ice Warrior in a submarine.  I don’t want to meet any Doctor Who villain in a submarine.  Terrifying.

Then we already covered Gaiman’s “The Last Cybermen.”

“Journey fo the Centre of the TARDIS” sounds interesting.  They said that this is because Moffat was disappointed with classic series episodes that explored the inside of the TARDIS, specifically in the Fourth Doctor episode “The Invasion of Time.”  So he wanted to make an episode that does a lot more exploration of the TARDIS.  Sounds like a good idea, but he handed over the idea to Steve Thompson.  Thompson is responsible for one of my least favorite Doctor Who episodes (“The Curse of the Black Spot”), my least favorite Sherlock episode (“The Blind Banker”), but strangely, also my favorite Sherlock episode (“The Reichenbach Fall”).  This one could go either way.

Finally, “The Eleven Doctors.”  Is it happening?  Is it not happening?  Will we have a muti-Doctor episode with fewer Doctors?  Will it actually be that last episode of the season that Moffat won’t tell us the name of?  Or will there be a completely different season finale, and a separate 50^th anniversary special on the actual 50^th anniversary date, November 23^rd.

Now, I’m going to tell you what I know, but I think some of it is flat out lies.  Remember Rule 2.

-Reports claim that the special has NOT been shot yet, and will be shot in April.  If the episode is the TBA episode at the end of this season, I call bullshit.  If it’s airing November 23^rd, then fine, I might buy that it hasn’t been shot yet.  But nobody at the BBC would cut it this close.  I have a feeling that this is part of what I’m going to call Operation Blue Harvest.

-Peter Davidson, the Fifth Doctor, has completely denied that he has been approached yet to appear in the special.  He said that he didn’t think that any of the older Doctors should be in the episode.  Again, I call Blue Harvest.  He was in a short multi-Doctor episode, “Time Crash,” and he knows full well how Moffat explained it away in that mini-episode, and how easily he can do it again.  Besides, if the Second Doctor can retire in 1969 and return in the mid-80s, and if Carole Ann Ford can return to her role as the Doctor’s teenage granddaughter 20 years after leaving the show, then you can bring back anyone.  “Having us both in the same place shorted out the time differential.”  And boom!  The problem was solved in “Time Crash.”

Davidson did say he was meeting with the Doctor Who producers later this month, but he didn’t think they were going to offer him a spot in the special.  What?  If he’s not covering something up, then he’s a moron.

-David Tennant denied that he’s been approached yet.  Bullshit.  If anyone’s coming back, it’s Tennant.

- Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones) denied having been approached.

-John Barrowman, (Captain Jack), strangely is the only person who has publicly confirmed that he had been in talks with the producers about appearing in the special. He then came out on Twitter a few days later and said he wouldn’t be in the special.  Again, I’m calling Blue Harvest.  Why would Barrowman talk to the producers and not reach an agreement.  Barrowman is a die hard Doctor Who fan who can quote chapter and verse from the classic series.  Barrowman would do the 50^th Anniversary special for free.  Hell, he’d probably pay the producers to let him do it.  What’s more likely is that Barrowman saying that he was in talks with producers turned out to be something that the producers didn’t want him leaking, so they insisted he go back on Twitter to deny that he would be in the special.  Blue Harvest.

Personally, I’ve been hoping to see the 11^th Doctor meet Jack.  I really hope Jack chews the Doctor out for not showing up during either of the crises in Seasons 3 and 4 of Torchwood.

-The only clue Matt Smith was willing to give out was the word “paintings”

-The episode will be aired in 3-D.  WHO CARES?!

-Moffat promised the season finale will be “seriously fan-boy centric,” further suggesting that the season finale and the 50^th anniversary special will be the same episode.

-Moffat also said that the Doctor’s greatest secret will be revealed in the season finale.  If you look back on a note I wrote called “A Brief History of the Cartmel Masterplan,” (https://www.facebook.com/notes/trevor-liam-byrne-smith/a-brief-history-of-the-cartmel-masterplan-a-trevors-doctor-who-overanalysis-supp/10150355733448688), you’ll see what I think the secret is.  (Maybe I'll move that over here, because I think that will be very important.)

-Executive producer Caro Skinner summed up the episode in three words:  “It.  Will.  Be.  Big.”

It better be.

Look, most of you are New Whovians, those who got into the show with the new series, not the old.  You might not all know this, but so am I.  I’m a little embarrassed to admit to all of you how recently I got into the show, but it’s much more recent than you might think considering how much ridiculous knowledge I have about this show.  I’ve gone through a lot of nerd stages in my life, from Star Trek to Star Wars to Buffy, and it looks like Doctor Who is just the one that’s really sticking with me.  I hope it always does.

Recently, the show Community had a great episode about a convention for a fictional TV series the show refers to often called Inspector Spacetime, which is, without a doubt, meant to be Doctor Who.  The character, Abed, only got into Inspector Spacetime a few years earlier, but became acknowledged online as Inspector Spacetime’s second biggest fan.

My point is, whether you’re a new Whovian or an old one, no matter how much or how little you know about the show, you're all welcome in...well, Whoville.  The reason I got into this show is that I’ve always loved franchises that create entire universes, with characters that can come back over and over again, and heroes that can continue to fight them until the end of time.  I love serials that leave you hanging on wondering what’s coming next, and stories that bring back a character or element you’ve been waiting to see return forever, but surprise you with it at the very end of the episode.  Doctor Who is everything I love about serial fiction.  I hope you can find some of the same joy in it that I do.

So I can’t wait to see how much fun this gets this season.  I know, we’re all a little bit disappointed with the first 5 episodes of the season, but the Christmas special brought us back some hope with a great story and some great writing.  There’s probably going to be a few stinkers this season (like Gatiss’s episodes, #anyonebutgatiss), but there’s one thing we know about what this season is going to be leading up to:

“It.  Will.  Be.  Big.”


UPDATE:  This came out as another little preview for "The Bells of St. John" after I finished writing this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01706q4

Never Trust Anyone Over 50 (Part I): A Preview of Season 7 (Part 2)

Just because Moffat decided to be a spoilsport this season and get rid of all the twoparters doesn’t mean we have to.  Welcome to the new home of my Doctor Who musings, “The Horror of Fan Blog.”  We’re going to start things off here with a two-part introduction to the season in the days leading up to the March 30^th premiere.  I had so much to say about the 50^th anniversary season, that I had to chop it up into separate pieces.

SPOILERS!!!

Okay, so, in retrospect, I realize now that Moffat might have had the 50^th Anniversary on his mind for longer than we thought, because, if you think about it, he’s been rolling out the whole rogues gallery this season.  First we started off with the all time most iconic villain of the series, the Daleks themselves.  Then we had sort of a Silurian episode, albeit without many actual Silurians appearing on screen.  But it was still Silurian-centric.  Then we saw, once again, the most popular recurring villain to have originated in the new series: the Weeping Angels.  Hell, even the Christmas Special was actually the return of an old recurring villain, The Great Intelligence, even though they only revealed it to be The Great Intelligence in the last seconds of the episode.  On top of that, the special even had a Sontaran and a Silurian (as good guys!).  Now, in the second half of the season we’re going to see the return of the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors, and who knows what else is there to surprise us.  Because, on Doctor Who, there really should always be surprises.  That’s what the classic series was always about.  But that won’t stop me from trying to guess what those surprises are going to be.

First, let’s talk about Villains We Know Are Coming:

The Cybermen:
We’ve all been getting bored with the Cybermen, to be honest.  Frankly, how the series has ever had room for both Daleks and Cybermen has always baffled me.  You’d think they’d be so similar that people would lose interest in the Cybermen.  But since their appearance in the 1^st Doctor’s final episode, their popularity has endured.

Moffat, realizing that the Cybermen had grown dull, decided he wanted to make them scary again.  While Moffat is really good at making something scary out of something mundane, he doesn’t really seem to have much desire to try to do that with classic Doctor Who villains too much.  So, what did he do?

He called Neil Mother Fucking Gaiman, that’s what he did.

That’s right, “The Last Cybermen” will be the Sandman genius himself’s second episode of the series.  Keep this up, Neil, and hopefully you’ll take over the series after Moffat leaves (#anyonebutgatiss).  If there’s anyone who can make the Cybermen scary again (or, well, creepy anyway), it’s Gaiman.  He’s said that he took the Cybermen from their first two appearances in the black and white era (“The Tenth Planet” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen”) and tried to bring back that style, but without forgetting everything that’s happened with them since.

The Ice Warriors:

The Ice Warriors were introduced in the 2^nd Doctor era and were last seen in the 3^rd Doctor era, although they haven’t appeared as a villain since the 2^nd Doctor era.  Rumors have been floating around of their return forever.  If the classic series hadn’t been cancelled in 1989, the writers said they would have brought the Ice Warriors back in the next year in an episode on a college campus in the 1960s.  In deleted material (that I wish they had never deleted) it would have been revealed that what happened in “The Waters of Mars” was actually a trap set by The Ice Warriors (it still probably was).  And they’ve appeared many times in expanded universe material.  If you wonder why they haven’t been around much, it’s probably because they’re a little too much like the Silurians and, even though the Ice Warriors came first, the Silurians seem to have captured more people’s imaginations.

The Ice Warriors are the ancient inhabitants of Mars who had a flourishing civilization 250 million years before even the most basic forms of life formed on Earth.  That’s why there is no sign of life on Mars:  It’s been so long, the civilization has faded to dust.  Somehow or another some of their race were frozen (I don’t remember how) and, over time, they eventually thawed out with the intention of turning Earth into their new home so their race can survive.

Also they hiss a lot.  Like snakes.  It sounds really cool.

The Ice Warriors episode, called “Cold War,” is going to involve an Ice Warrior stuck in a submarine.  That sounds awesome!  It’s written by Mark Gatiss.  That sounds much less awesome.  (#anyonebutgatiss)

The Trickster:

A promotional poster about this coming second half of the season was released recently and it has some clues hidden in the image.  The image shows the Doctor and Clara crashing through a giant window and, if you look at the images in the reflections, you can see some of the villains who are going to be in this second half of the season.  The largest version of the image I’ve been able to find was right here (click to enlarge):

Now, there aren’t too many things that this taught me.  There are some Cybermen and Ice Warriors who are very visible, but we already knew about them.  There are creatures in the bottom left and right of the image (who look like they might be the same creature) but I don’t recognize them, although they look vaguely like the Sycorax.  The middle right and left have some strange image in them that look like old gas station pumps with oval heads coming out of them.  Don’t ask me what that’s supposed to be.

But then, up in the left corner, not all the way up, but more than halfway up, and all the way up to the top right you see a man in a top hat without eyes.  Creepy looking, ain’t he?  That, my friends, is The Trickster.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Trickster, that’s because, for the most part, you’re not supposed to have heard of the Trickster, because he’s not a Doctor Who villain.  He’s a villain from the Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which was a fun but much more kid-based show than Doctor Who.  SJA was a very wholesome show about a journalist and a group of very age inappropriate children who hung out at her house and went on life threatening adventures with her without their parents knowing about it.  As much as we all love Sarah Jane, when you think about it, that show was really weird.

As most of you know, SJA was cut short by the shocking death of Elizabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith, after her long but very silent battle with cancer.  She died around the same time that Nicholas Courtney, who played an equally iconic character in the same era as when Sladen started out (The Brigadier), and the show has made two in-universe tributes to the Brigadier.  The first in “The Wedding of River Song” where the Doctor tries to call the Brigadier and finds he’s dead, the second in “The Power of Three,” when the Brig’s daughter is now in charge of UNIT.  Hopefully, the appearance of the Trickster means that there will be some sort of tribute to Sarah Jane.  It would be offensive to try and suggest that Sarah Jane died of anything other than natural causes, but bringing in the Trickster might mean the Doctor is extra motivated by the death of his old friend.

And, while I haven’t watched much of SJA (just the pilot and the two episodes the Doctor is in), I’m sure there are some loose ends to clear up.  The show didn’t get a finale since the lead actress died unexpectedly.  Maybe we’ll see some of the characters from SJA show up to give the show its real finale.  That’s a pretty old tradition with spin-offs and shows from the same creator:  to finish off your story on your other show.  Remember that horrible show from the creator of the X-Files called Millennium?  Since that got cancelled early and they didn’t get to finish the story, they tied up the loose ends of Millennium in an X-Files episode.  Same with the X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunmen.

The Trickster has been forced outside of time and space and can only barely push his way into our world sometimes.  The only way he can gain access back into our universe is to feed off of the chaos that he creates.  The Trickster created The Trickster’s Brigade, a group that seeks to make changes in history simply to feed off of the ensuing chaos it creates in the timeline.  You’ve actually met a member of the Trickster’s brigade on Doctor Who:  she put the scarab on Donna’s back.  It was only mentioned in passing dialogue at the end of the episode that the scarab was part of the Trickster’s brigade, hence why there was this woman who seemingly had no motive to change time.  She wanted to create chaos.

Now, the fact that the Trickster’s never been on Doctor Who doesn’t mean that the Doctor has never met the Trickster.  The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors both made guest appearances on SJA, and the Tenth Doctor was in an episode called “The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith” where the Trickster tricked Sarah Jane into thinking she was in love with a human and about to get married, but there was some sinister plot behind it.  I don’t remember the whole thing.  SJA wasn’t very good.

Still, I’m excited at the idea of an SJA crossover.  The Trickster’s a cool idea for a villain, someone who cares about nothing other than creating chaos in the universe.  He could be a force to be reckoned with.  Some people have already suggested online that, perhaps, Clara’s splintering across the timeline was something the Trickster did.  Far fetched, but not more impossible than River being Amy and Rory’s daughter.

Villains I Think Might Be Coming Back

The Master:  Okay, okay, okay, hear me out!  I know some of you are bored with the Master, and frankly I don’t understand why.  He’s the anti-Doctor.  Sometimes it’s fun to see a hero up against a villain who plays to the heroe’s greatest weaknesses.  The Joker is chaotic, and Batman can’t understand chaos.  Lex Luthor is an intellectual villain, and Superman is a brute force hero.  But sometimes it’s fun anyway to see a hero matched up against someone who has his exact same strengths but uses them for evil.

Now, John Simm has denied rumors that he’s returning, but we all know what denial means on this show.  But here’s the reasons I think the Master is coming back anyway:

1.  The Master doesn’t have to be played by John Simm.  Simm was, more or less, the 6^th Master.  (The Masters are a little hard to count because, in the classic series, he was out of regenerations so he didn’t regenerate, he just stole bodies to stay alive.  The first Master we ever saw was, presumably, the 13^th Master.  Then there was the Master in “The Deadly Assassin” who was supposedly the same Master as the one played by Roger Delgado, but he was shown as being burnt to a crisp like a piece of overcooked bacon, allowing another actor to play him.  Then there’s whoever played the imprisoned Master at the beginning of the 1996 movie, and we have no idea what incarnation he’s supposed to be.  It’s all complicated.)  In the new series, he’s regained his ability to regenerate, so he can be played by whoever they want.  Also, last year reports were coming out that the rumors that Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in Moffat’s 21^st Century adaptation of Sherlock) was going to be the new Master were not just rumors, but that he was in serious conversations with the producers about replacing Simm.  Personally, I can’t think of a better actor to play the Master.

2.  Like I’ve said, the entire rogues gallery is coming back this season.  The Daleks, the Cybermen, The Silurians, The Sontarans, The Ice Warriors, the Weeping Angels, and even the Great Intelligence.  This isn’t an accident. This is an anniversary celebration, for certain.  Moffat’s trying to make this season a full on celebration of everything that makes Doctor Who great.  Where Davies did a good job of bringing the original unholy trinity of Doctor Who villains (The Daleks, The Cybermen, and The Master), Moffat’s done a lot to bring back all the recurring villains, even the minor ones.  With such a parade of classic villains, it seems hard to believe that Moffat would overlook The Master.

3.  The Master’s appearances should always be unadvertised surprises.  This was especially true of the 5^th Doctor era.  In every episode in which the Master appeared, he spent at least the first 30 minute segment in disguise.  Unlike Dalek, Cybermen, and Sontaran episodes, his episodes were never labeled with his name in the title.  Sometimes, Anthony Ainsley would even volunteer to not be credited in the first episode so that it wasn’t obvious that he was in the episode in disguise.  Not only does it make sense to bring back The Master, it makes perfect sense for his return to remain a surprise.

The Rani:  No villain has received so much demand from fans to return without the fans wishes being fulfilled.  She only appeared in two episodes, one Sixth Doctor episode, “The Mark of the Rani,” and the Seventh Doctor’s first episode, “Time and the Rani.”  Still, she seems to have made quite of an impression on fans, perhaps because she was the one to kill the least popular Doctor in the history of the series.  The Rani was a Time Lady who, in her youngest years, was part of a popular social circle at the Gallifrey Academy which was made up of her, The Master, The Doctor, possibly the Meddling Monk, and a few others.  The Doctor seems to be the only member of this group to come out of it with a conscience.  At the end of “Last of the Time Lords,” one of the producers called the hand that took the Master’s fob watch “the hand of the Rani,” completely as a joke that he thought nobody would take seriously because he thought nobody would remember who the Rani was.  He was wrong, and had to apologize for giving them a false hint.

And there was a very large segment of fans who thought River Song was going to turn out to be a regeneration of The Rani.  Thank God that isn’t true.

The Rani is a brilliant concept for a villain.  Not so much a megalomaniac (although she kind of was in her second appearance), but her main purpose was as a biochemist.  She studied the chemicals in brains.  The problem was, she had no sense of scientific ethics.  She would play with people’s minds as an experiment without any regard for how it would affect the subjects.  While she became more bent on universe domination in her second appearance, her first appearance made her very interesting in that she wasn’t immoral, merely amoral.  That can make for a pretty dangerous villain.

The problems with this are that The Rani does come from the least popular era of Doctor Who history, the notoriously reviled, gruesome, dark, and generally rejected Season 22.  While the show wouldn’t be cancelled for a few years after that, the show was forced into hiatus for about a year because of the complaints about how violent the show became and the meaner attitude of the new, Sixth Doctor.  While they squeezed a few more seasons out of the show, I honestly believed that those were just a courtesy and that Season 22 was the reason the show was cancelled.  The producers might be reluctant to bring back a villain from that era.  Additionally, as a Time Lady, she can’t return unless we find she somehow avoided the Time War, which would contradict the Oracle’s prediction in “The End of Time (Part 2)”.  But, let’s face it, there will be more Time Lords somewhere down the line, and so, sooner or later, somebody is going to have to contradict the Oracle.  The plus side of bringing back the Rani, of course, is that, as a Time Lady, you could cast literally any woman in the world to play her.

Omega:  Before the Time Lords were the Time Lords, they were just the Gallifreyans.  Three men—Rassillon, Omega, and The Other—came up with an idea that they thought might give them the power of time travel.  This idea involved harnessing the power of a supernova.  Obviously, that was dangerous.  Rassillon and The Other survived, but Omega was sucked into the black hole, putting him in a universe of anti-matter.  Twice he tried to escape his universe, but anti-matter and matter, when they touch each other, create a huge explosion (which is one of the few instances of Doctor Who being scientifically accurate).  He still desires revenge on the Time Lords for abandoning him and not trying harder to rescue him after he gave them the gift of time travel.

(Most of this story was only hinted at in the series, and more fully articulated in a short comic called “Star Death” by Alan Moore.)

In “The Big Bang,” many fans thought that the voice that said “Silence will fall!” and then cracked the Doctor’s viewscreen in the exact pattern of the cracks in time, was Omega.  It’s possible that some still believe it since, once we saw a Silent, we could hear that their voice didn’t sound like that voice in “The Big Bang.”  I’m more inclined to chalk that up to the producers not having decided yet, by the time they made “The Bing Bang,” what the Silence should sound like.

Omega is another character a lot of people want back.  And, if they’re going to finally acknowledge that the Doctor is really a reincarnation of The Other, which I think they’re going to (more on that later), then a great plot line could be made out of Omega.  Of course, if the Doctor is the Other, and Omega is coming back, you need to bring back one more person…

Rassilon:  In the classic series, Rassilon was long dead.  He was a great historic figure in Time Lord history, by far the most honored.  He had managed, somehow, to leave a form of his own consciousness behind in his tomb to warn those who would disturb his tomb (and other stuff, long story), but he was still dead.

In “The End of Time,” Rassilon was alive again with no explanation.  I think the only thing that established him as Rassilon was the Doctor saying it at the very end, as Rassilon was being sucked back into the time lock.  So now you’ve established, twice that the Time Lords can somehow bring people (or, at least, other Time Lords) back to life.  The Master flat out said that that’s what they did to him, and now somehow they have the ability to resurrect their greatest historical figure.  All of this seems to have been just for the Time War.  Where the fuck did they get that technology?  Do the Time Lords have a Lazarus Pit?  I guess that's why Rassilon became evil only when he came back from the dead.