Inspirations: The Name of the Doctor

Nurse: "Knock, knock..."

Costard: "Who goeth without?"

Nurse: "Doctor"

Costard: "Doctor who?"

Nurse: "Verily, yea!"

Costard: "I doth not get it. Get thee to a nunnery!"

Exeunt, pursued by camelopards.

Source: Loves Labours Won, Act III, Scene V (1599) - the earliest known example of the Doctor Who "Knock, Knock" joke (probably).

It's a question that certainly goes right back to 30th November 1963 - Doctor Who? (though the "Knock, Knock" joke certainly feels as if it's been around since Homer was a lad).

In the episode The Cave of Skulls we have the following exchanges:

Ian: "Just open the doors, Dr Foreman".

Doctor: "Eh? Doctor who?..."

And when Barbara also refers to him as Dr Foreman Ian responds: "That's not his name. Who is he? Doctor who?...".

Later stories played with the question in a jokey fashion, such as in The Curse of Peladon and of The Mutants. In three Gerry Davis era stories it is even assumed that "Doctor Who" really is his name.

Most producers took great pains to stress that it wasn't, and pointed out that there was no question mark at the end of the title, though JNT stupidly plastered his Doctors with the "?" motif.

The climax to Series 6 had seen Dorium Maldovar speak of "the Battle of Trenzalore", and the final lines of dialogue are:

Dorium: "The first question. The question that must never be answered, hidden in plain sight. The question you've been running from all your life. Doctor who? Doctor who? Doctor Who".

At the same time that the Doctor was trying to discover just who the Impossible Girl was, Clara was also trying to find out more about him. She would have seen his name in the book on The Time War, in the TARDIS library - but time was reset and this would have been forgotten.

Choosing for a title The Name of the Doctor for his latest finale, Steven Moffat was very much indulging in what's known as "click-bait". Those are the sensationalist on-line headlines designed to make you click on a link (generally leading to an advert or a story that is actually far from sensational, but you've given it a page view to add to their total anyway.

Fans got worked up about the title, either happily expecting that we would finally know the name, or arguing that it should never, ever be revealed. Of course, most of us recognised it for what it was, and knew that we would be none the wiser come the end of the episode.

It transpired that the Doctor was obliged to speak his name to act as a password to open his tomb, and he would be forced to do this by the Great Intelligence. (The tomb is the TARDIS, but its dimensions are leaching out and it has grown to the size of skyscraper).

Way back when we first met River Song, in Series 4, we saw that she knew his name, and he claimed she could only know this if... The implication being that they were married at some point. We saw a ceremony take place - albeit in an alternate timeline - in that Series 6 finale, the one in which Dorium raised the question.

When the moment comes in this episode, Moffat cheats by having River claim that she's already said the name, off camera. 

It should be noted that this is an already dead River, but Moffat needed her for the episode to get round this whole name issue, so she's a sort of data ghost.

This story marks the conclusion of a brief Great Intelligence trilogy, though it's only a cameo appearance in the middle story - The Bells of Saint John - when revealed as the villain working behind the scenes.

Richard E Grant plays the being once again, and it has new servants which it animates. After robot Yeti and living snowmen, we now have the Whisper Men - Moffat's latest attempt at a creepy monster.

Also returning are the Paternoster Gang. We get to see what Strax does on his days off - indulging in fist fights in Glasgow.

The other principal task of The Name of the Doctor is to finally tell us just who Clara is - in terms of the two people who looked and acted like her in different time zones. There had been futuristic Dalek-convert Oswin in Asylum of the Daleks, and Victorian barmaid / governess Clara in The Snowmen.

The Great Intelligence wants to destroy the Doctor from within his own timestream - entering the temporal scar his death leaves and travelling back to undo all the good he has done. To stop him, Clara follows him into the scar to correct these interventions. We are treated to the sight of both Clara and the Great Intelligence appearing in clips from old classic era stories, encountering past Doctors. We see the Second Doctor running across a Californian beach - the Troughton footage edited in from The Five Doctors. From this story we also see Third Doctor Jon Pertwee in "Bessie". Both clips come from scenes in which the Doctor is about to be captured by the Death Zone Time Scoop. Tom Baker is seen on Gallifrey, in a clip from The Invasion of Time. The Davison clip is from another Gallifrey story - Arc of Infinity. The Colin Baker encounter is newly filmed with an extra in clown costume, whilst McCoy is seen dangling by his umbrella in Dragonfire.

The Hartnell clip comes from The Aztecs, but is edited into a new scene set on Gallifrey "a long time ago" - the First Doctor's initial departure in a stolen TARDIS with Susan. It turns out that it was Clara who diverted them away from a fully operational TT capsule, as it will be more fun. This rather contradicts The Doctor's Wife (another click-bait title if ever there was one). (No sign of the Fugitive Doctor, so stick that in your pipe, Chibnall).

We will later see other Doctors running around a hellish landscape, but these are just extras dressed up.

And then we see someone else - but we'll talk about him next time...