End of Chapter One

I’m looking forward to The Day of the Doctor, but I’m not one of the seemingly many people with reams of questions about what will happen. Years of Moffat’s producership have taught me not to get my hopes up. He is, after all, the man who claimed that he’d got a “game-changing” revelation lined up only to reveal that it was just the fairly obvious true identity of a character he’d introduced a few years earlier.

No, I don’t expect much from Moffat. He’s proven that he’s relatively capable of scripting a frothy runaround and so that’s what I’m hoping for here. It seems like the least of a host of potential evils.

What’s all this about people escaping from paintings? Will Chris Eccleston appear? Will Hurt’s Doctor regenerate? Are there more “secret” Doctors? Is the possession of The Moment as meaningful as we’ve been led to believe? What’s the regeneration Moffat claims we’ve overlooked? These are some of the questions a lot of fans (many, it must be said, from the excitable realms of North America) are working themselves into a frenzy predicting answers to. Some interest me more than others but none have provoked me into sitting and thinking for hours on end about how it all links together. It’s impossible to get every aspect right so why try? Just sit back and think about the practical things that you can predict.

For example…

A friend pointed out to me many months ago that having Zygons in the episode is the perfect chance for Moffat to pull one of his favourite tricks: a twist that at first seems wonderful but on second look is straightforward and, ultimately, crushingly boring. How hard is it to imagine a Zygon posing as the a former Doctor? Not very. Perhaps Hurt’s Doctor is a Zygon imposter. “But we saw him in the Doctor’s timestream!” you cry. Yeah, but we also saw the Great Intelligence and Clara there. It was a pretty packed place. A Zygon sneaking in or, more likely, bonding itself into the Doctor’s memories (or whatever) seems as plausible as anything else.

This is one of the many scenarios I hope we don’t see. Even talk of practicalities becomes an exercise in futility.

Eccleston then. I’d like to see him appear but I’m not banking on it. He seems as keen as ever to distance himself from the show. A regeneration for Hurt leading to a brief cameo seems the likeliest way he’d crop up, which would ironically lead to him looking older than he ever did in his solitary year at the moment of his “birth”. I wouldn’t care one way or the other if that happened. I don’t think I’ll ever shake the feeling that Hurt is only appearing because Eccleston said no to the concept of being the dark Doctor of the Time War. From what’s been revealed of the plot it seems that Hurt is nothing more than a surrogate for the Ninth Doctor we met in 2005. It’s a way of sticking to the story he wanted without the “right” actor.

A Hurt to Eccleston regeneration would ultimately be meaningless anyway, another piece of contrived lore crammed in by an overzealous Moffat. But that approach has characterised his entire approach to the fiftieth. Hollow promises about the last half a century merely having been “the first chapter” and a tedious focus on something that was created to emphatically remain off-screen have been the order of the day, instead of the talk of a fun episode with an enjoyable story and a returning Doctor that I would have liked to hear.

And while we're on the subject of the show's lore, the twelve regenerations "rule" that's being quoted in papers and magazines and by fans... well, it's silly isn't it? It was a throwaway element of a story in the mid-seventies and has stuck mainly because it's a number that feels right. The number of people that think it's a significant problem that must be solved is staggering. Doctor is a science fantasy show for kids. It will not end because Robert Holmes arbitrarily selected the number thirteen as the times a single Time Lord could live. Within the logic of the show it's easy enough to resolve. The Master's been offered new regeneration cycles before. He's even been resurrected, presumably after his "final" death. Is it really that hard to imagine the Thirteenth Doctor (whether that's Capaldi or someone else) getting an episode in which they stumble across some ancient relic of Time Lord tech that grants a new cycle or even an infinite supply? No, it's not. Because the continuation of the show is more important to the BBC than adhering to nonsense laws introduced for dramatic effect.

Will November 23^rd 2013 go down as the beginning of chapter two? No. It will go as the day another of Moff’s hyperbolic shams was revealed. This is not to say the episode’s going to be bad, more that it won’t be the startling new direction Moffles is promising. I’m setting my expectations low. And you should too.