Inspirations: The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe

Like his first festive effort, Steven Moffat really couldn't be bothered hiding the inspiration for his second Christmas episode.

CS Lewis wrote The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950. It was the first of seven books known collectively as The Chronicles of Narnia - the fantasy realm visited by the young heroes.

Like Moffat's story, the book tells of some siblings who are evacuated from the city to a large country house thanks to German bombing raids. It's home to a scientist named Digory Kirke.

The youngest of the children discovers that a wardrobe in the house is really a portal to a magical realm - Narnia - which is populated by talking animals and mythical creatures like fauns. The land is in permanent winter, thanks to an evil witch.

Lewis died on 22nd November 1963 - the day before Doctor Who made its debut.

There are four Pevensey siblings (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy), so Moffat reduces his evacuees to a more manageable two - Cyril and Lily. Whilst the house in the book belongs to someone called Digory, it's an Uncle Digby in the Doctor Who version.

The Doctor equates to the Lion, and the Widow (Madge Arwell) to the Witch (though only in terms of the sound of the words - she's nice) and the TARDIS, obviously, is the Wardrobe - a cabinet which can transport people to fabulous realms.

However, it isn't the Wardrobe / TARDIS which leads to Narnia here - a snowbound planet.

The Doctor instead sets up this visit to another world as a Christmas present to the children, so the portal is through a large gift-wrapped box.

One of the reasons for adapting an existing story was that Moffat was tied up with Sherlock, and had little time available to concentrate on this episode.

The story is mainly set at Christmas, and on the trees on the planet we see egg-like growths which resemble Christmas tree baubles. Moffat knew that the festive episodes tended to be watched by people who did not necessarily follow the usual series, so it could be standalone.

The wooden king and queen derived from a childhood nightmare of Moffat's. He had dreamed of a wooden king telling him off.

Amy and Rory had been effectively written out of the on-going narrative in the latter part of Series 6, so they did not need to be included other than a cameo. Arthur Darvill was busy in the theatre anyway.

In their place would be a new one-off companion figure which Moffat decided should be "the ultimate mother".

Madge is played by Claire Skinner, best known for family-based sitcom Outnumbered.

Reg Arwell is a Lancaster bomber pilot. These aircraft are best known for their role in the Dambuster raids of May 1943 (Operation Chastise, which employed Barnes Wallis's bouncing bombs). This was the subject of the 1955 movie The Dam Busters, starring Richard Todd.

However, if there's one film which has inspired this sequence of the story it is Powell & Pressburger's A Matter of Life And Death (1946), in which the pilot of a doomed bomber is saved by angelic intervention.

Moffat had likened the Doctor in Christmas episodes to a festive angel.

Reg is played by Alexander Armstrong, who had been voicing computer Mr Smith throughout The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The snowbound planet is visited by woefully unfunny harvesters from Androzani Major. This planet first featured in, funnily enough, The Caves of Androzani - Peter Davison's final story.

They are supposed to provide light relief - but don't.

Billis was named for exec-producer Beth Willis, and Venn-Garr for Piers Wenger.

Next time: more Daleks than you can shake a plunger at and, boy, are they mad...

Inspirations: The Wedding of River Song

It's a season finale, and Steven Moffat has elected to make this a single episode affair, so there's a lot to squeeze in. Unfortunately, there's such a jumble of ideas and imagery that it ends up a dissatisfying dog's breakfast of an episode.

One of the problems is that Moffat throws too much into the mix, as the plot involves the whole of history happening at the same instance - thanks to River fracturing Time. She does this by failing to assassinate the Doctor at Lake Silencio, taking us right back to the opening episode of the season.

Before then we have Simon Callow reprising Charles Dickens (from The Unquiet Dead) appearing on Breakfast TV; pterodactyls in Hyde Park; and Roman centurions in chariots stopped at traffic lights.

The episode has a story arc to tie up - though it will still leave threads dangling - and include other elements from the current series and earlier.

For instance we see Ian McNeice's Winston Churchill, first seen in Victory of the Daleks, and he's tended by a physician who is a Silurian. The latter is played by Richard Hope, who was seen as a Silurian scientist in The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood.

The Doctor is locked up in the Tower of London, as he was in his First and Eleventh incarnations, and mentioned by the Third. These came under the reigns of Henry VIII, James I and VI, and Charles II.

A scene had to be written where the Doctor got out of his prison clothes and back into his normal gear as the bowtie was to be used in the wedding ceremony.

From this series, Madam Kovarian is back, as are the Silents.

Silents are seen in water-filled tanks - to stop them using their electrical powers - within an Egyptian pyramid. Moffat got this image from a holiday in Dubai where he saw water tanks built into an ancient structure.

The pyramid is marked as Area 52 - based on the famous Area 51 in Nevada, long associated with crashed UFOs and ET-retrofitted secret aircraft. This had been seen in Day of the Moon.

A lot of what takes place occurs in the time-fractured reality created by River's failure to kill the Doctor - a fixed point in time, as first introduced by RTD to explain why the Doctor can't simply time travel to change big events. They're the new "Blinovitch Limitation Effect" - a famed concept from the Pertwee era.

River's identity had already been explained in the mid-season finale - but her exact relationship with the Doctor was still to be revealed. In her first appearance, she had known the Doctor's name - and it was suggested that the only way she could have known this was if they had married.

This thread is picked up here - as the episode title suggests. However, the ceremony takes place in the fractured timeline, so it's not a very satisfying resolution.

Indeed, the bulk of the episode should not be recalled by any of the main characters as they are alternate versions, and this timeline is corrected when the Doctor engineers a fake assassination. It is the Teselecta (introduced in Let's Kill Hitler) which is shot by River (though the Doctor is hiding inside it. This cheat seems to be enough to meet the conditions of the fixed point, and allows Time to run as normal.

In the opening section we see the Doctor the Doctor seeking out information about the Silence. He takes the data-core from a Dalek - the first appearance by a New Paradigm model since their ill-advised introduction in Series 5. It is the white Supreme, though the lighting of the scene makes it look blue.

The Doctor also meets a character named Gavrok, who resembles a Viking warrior.

He is played by Mark Gatiss, though he opted to be hidden under heavy facial prosthetics and uses a pseudonym - Rondo Hoxton. Gatiss is a huge fan of classic horror movies, and the name derives from Rondo Hatton. This actor suffered from acromegaly - an abnormal bone growth condition, which gave him heavy, misshapen features. His looks lead him to a short-lived movie career in villainous roles, one of which was as the "Hoxton Creeper" in Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death. Despite being killed off, the character of the Creeper appeared in two further films, before Hatton's early death, aged 51, in 1946.

Gavrok leads the Doctor to a transept of the Headless Monks (first mentioned in Time of the Angels - one of their catacombs, full of skulls. Here is found the still living head of Dorium Maldovar, who was introduced in The Pandorica Opens.

The transept was inspired by the Indiana Jones movies.

Nicholas "The Brig" Courtney died earlier in the year, and Moffat elected to have the Brigadier's death acknowledged in the narrative. Everyone in this story wears an eye-patch at one point - a nice nod to Courtney's favourite convention anecdote from the recording of Inferno - a story concerning an alternative universe.

Moffat had planned to show the Doctor reading Knitting For Girls as far back as The Beast Below.

Next time: Doctor Who goes to Narnia...

Inspirations: Closing Time

Unlike previous series since 2005, Steven Moffat decided to forego the usual two-part finale and produce two separate stories to conclude his second year in charge. Series 5 hadn't been a conventional two-parter anyway.

Closing Time is, first and foremost, a sequel to The Lodger. Gareth Roberts' Series 5 episode had seen the Doctor temporarily stranded on Earth and having to adapt to normal day-to-day living. Part of that had involved him standing in for new pal Craig at his place of work. Roberts takes this element and expands it into a full story.

"What would happen if the Doctor got a flat", becomes "what would happen if the Doctor had to hold down a job?".

Rather than plant the Doctor into an identical set-up - the same flat and Craig in the same relationship - things have moved on. He's living in a new house in Colchester, and has a baby. There's less room in the story for Sophie, so Daisy Haggard is reduced to a cameo role topping and tailing the episode. The actress had only limited availability anyway, as she was appearing on stage in London at the time.

The episode is all about what Craig and the Doctor get up to in her absence, with her fretting about how he will cope whilst he manages very well indeed, thank you - helped by the Doctor.

The baby was originally going to be girl, named Grace - later Tess.

Roberts based the interaction between the Doctor and Craig on that between the Second Doctor and Jamie.

(On entering Craig's new house, the Doctor comments: "You've redecorated. I don't like it" - a phrase coined by the Second Doctor, and used by others since).

The episode becomes a companion-lite story, with Craig fulfilling this role. Amy and Rory only feature in one scene and don't interact with the Doctor.

The name of the perfume she advertises - "Petrichor" - derives from one of the things Idris put into Rory's mind in The Doctor's Wife. It's the smell of earth after rainfall.

The reason for the Doctor's visit to Craig is that he is revisiting old friends as he thinks he is nearing the end of his life - just as the Tenth did in The End of Time Part II.

The setting of a department store came about after a police station, hospital and a supermarket had been considered. The latter was problematic as too many brand names would appear, and there was little narrative justification in the Doctor and Craig continually visiting a police station. Hospitals had featured several times already. A department store setting had formed the basis for the first version of The Faceless Ones, before shifting to an airport.

Roberts wanted a double name for his store - like Swan & Edgar or Marks & Spencer. Sanderson was named after a character in a book he had just read, whilst Grainger was one of his old teachers.

For the main threat we have the return of the Cybermen - in their first full episode of the Moffat era. He had featured them as part of the Pandorica Alliance, and then as part of the pre-credits sequence of A Good Man Goes To War. Moffat is on record as stating that they are one of his favourite monsters, and he will use them a lot - appearing in the penultimate episode of five of his six seasons.

Roberts gets to bring back the Cybermats - seen only in two Troughton stories and Tom Baker's Revenge of the Cybermen, their last appearance. (The Doctor actually quotes his earlier self from that story - "Not a rat. It's a Cybermat").

They were going to appear in Silver Nemesis, and Mike Tucker even created a new prop, but it ended up being dropped. His Cybermat can be seen in the (More Than) Thirty Years in the TARDIS documentary, menacing Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant.

For their new design, it was decided to accentuate the fact that these were converted animals, so they were given sharp fangs.

The exact nature and origins of the old Cybermats were never very clear.

A working title for the story was "Three Cybermen and a Baby" - a play on the name of the popular 1987 film starring Ted Danson, Steve Guttenberg and Tom Selleck.

Initially a lone converted human guarded a pod, inside which was a Cyber-Controller and a pair of Cybermen.

The Doctor plans a trip to Exedor. This name was made up by Roberts from Exxilon and Aggedor, from Season 11.

The door to the Cybership is said to be made of disillium - a metal first mentioned in Carnival of Monsters.

Mention is made of Star Trek - making it a fictitious TV programme in this universe. A Series 14 episode suggests instead that it isn't. (Around this time there was a crossover comic book series featuring the Cybermen and the Borg).

Once the Cybermen have been defeated - emotions being fatal to Cybermen from The Invasion to The Age of Steel - we have a coda with River Song which links into the final episode. This shows her being abducted from the Luna University and becoming the "Impossible Astronaut".

Next time: it's all happening at once, quite literally...

Inspirations: The God Complex

Steven Moffat had considered a story set around a huge, seemingly deserted hotel as a possible first Christmas Special. A woman staying at the luxurious hotel over the festive period would find that her family and all the other guests had vanished, and she was alone until she met the Doctor. Moffat even had an idea of who he might like to play the woman - Helen Mirren.

The inspiration had been Moffat's own stays in hotels, which he often found disorientating.

Moffat passed the idea onto Toby Whithouse - suggesting that the hotel should instead be run-down and that the rooms keep changing. The story was originally intended to occupy the sixth slot of Series 5.

The changing rooms and the corridors resembling a maze led inevitably to thoughts of the Minotaur.

The series had already featured the legendary half-man, half-bull on more than one occasion. The Doctor and Zoe had encountered the mythical creature in The Mind Robber, and then he and Jo Grant had met a real Minotaur - created by the Chronovore Kronos - in ancient Atlantis.

Former Script Editor Anthony Read, who favoured adapting works of literature for Doctor Who stories, later contributed a sci-fi adventure based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur - The Horns of Nimon. 

Rather than simply ignore the resemblance, Whithouse elected to explicitly make his Minotaur a relative of the Nimon.

Both the original myth and Read's adventure had seen the Minotaur being fed sacrifices, and this is carried on here.

Whithouse came up with the idea that the people who had once worshipped the creature had grown apathetic and turned their back on this religion. They therefore cast it out in a form of prison which would float through space, occasionally bringing sacrifices to it to continue to feed it.

He did not want the Minotaur to be purely evil, however. Knowing that people had to die to feed it, it had over time come to hate its existence and wanted to die itself. This would make it a sympathetic monster.

The nature of the hotel settled on a 1980's design - as this was the time when Whithouse had stayed in hotels on childhood holidays.

He was also inspired by the cult ITV series Sapphire and Steel, which had featured its characters trapped in seemingly mundane environments (such as the roadside café in the final story).

The story title is a play on words - in the same way that Tony Read had played with the term "power complex" in his story - it's both Soldeed's state of mind and the Nimon's lair.

A "god complex" is a psychological condition in which a person has an unshakeable belief that they are infallible - always right and can do no wrong. As well as having a story about a being which feeds on faith, it is also a god - albeit a redundant one - which lives in a labyrinth (or complex) of corridors.

Gibbis the Tivolian was created to act as a mirror to the Minotaur. He and his people exhibit the opposite of the "god complex" - being conditioned to fail and be perpetually conquered.

In the initial drafts, Gibbis was a human character named Edward.

The religious character was originally going to be a devout Christian, but this was changed to make them a Muslim to give the group more diversity.

The idea of the bedrooms containing personal fears came later. The executive producers were worried that the hotel setting might prove boring for viewers after a while, and so it was suggested that the rooms could feature bizarre characters - clowns and gorillas as well as people - to add some visual variety.

Whithouse had been thinking a lot about Hell and Purgatory / Limbo after writing the opening episode of his third series of Being Human, which had featured characters in a form of limbo.

The appearance of Weeping Angels was purely a cameo decision. 

The Doctor gets a room of his own, and it is obviously No.11. This was always going to be left open for fans to debate what it might contain, until Moffat revisited it for his final Matt Smith episode.

Amy's room, containing young Amelia Pond, was No.7 - the age she was when she first encountered the Doctor.

Cameos of a different kind were the photographs on the hotel walls of previous victims. These were simply standard publicity pictures of various creatures, plus members of the crew - including producer Marcus Wilson.

The reveal of the true spacecraft environment was inspired by the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As part of the overall season story arc agreed with Moffat, Whithouse included the idea of the Doctor deciding that his adventures were going to get Amy and Rory killed, and it might be best to part company - helping facilitate this year's Doctor-lite episode.

Next time: Are you being converted? The Cybermen find the concept of Love mind-blowing in a sequel to The Lodger.

Inspirations: The Girl Who Waited

Tom MacRae was a protégé of Russell T Davies, commissioned by him to write the story which reintroduced the Cybermen in 2006.

He almost came to write a second story for the 4th Series - a haunted house plot in which the Doctor encountered people making a Most Haunted style show (something which Supernatural did years before).

His second contribution finally comes here, when he came up with a timey-wimey storyline provisionally titled "The Visitors' Room". It later became "The Visiting Hour" and then "Kindness".

The final title was a nod back to young Amelia Pond in The Eleventh Hour.

The idea of Amy being trapped in an environment in which time ran at a different speed was there from the outset. Apparently the first 20 pages of script never changed between the first draft and the broadcast version.

One thing which did have to be taken into account was that this would Series 6's Doctor-lite episode. Matt Smith was off making Closing Time, spending only a day on the TARDIS set.

The way this is managed is rather poor - a disease that somehow only affects beings with two hearts.

Smith's unavailability at least allowed MacRae to concentrate on Amy and Rory, and it dropped some of the sci-fi elements and extraneous characters to concentrate on them - making it a bit of a romance.

As well as being the Doctor-lite story, it was also to be a cheap one. This is why we mostly have plain white rooms,  and location filming at the Cardiff Bay Millennium Centre - used many times before, most notably in New Earth.

The Handbots were originally envisaged as cloaked figures, with only their outstretched hands visible.

The "deadly touch" idea was inspired by Terror of the Vervoids, as Macrae recalled the Vervoids issuing toxic spines from their hands.

An early draft saw a hand chopped off a Handbot continue to move around by itself - inspired by Thing from The Addams Family. Moffat stored this image away for future use (see Flatline).

Unfortunately, Series 6 had already featured a well-intentioned medical artificial intelligence posing a threat - the Siren in the pirates story.

Thought was given to hiring an older actress to play the older Amy, but Karen Gillan fought to be allowed to play both roles. Neil Gorton had shown he could do effective aged make-up (such as Tennant sports in The Family of Blood and The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords).

Facially, it's fine, but physically she doesn't really convince as an older woman.

Next time: The Horns of Nimon meets Crossroads...

Inspirations: Night Terrors

Night Terrors is written by Mark Gatiss, but it follows the Steven Moffat rule of twisting and corrupting some aspect of childhood to create a scary story which adults could relate to.

The series had attempted to do a creepy child story in the recent past - and fallen flat on its face over it, so why Moffat and Gatiss thought they could succeed where Fear Her had failed is anyone's guess.

Gatiss' story is pretty much a retread of the earlier story, with a creepy child capable of transporting others into the fantasy domain of their imagination. For Chloe it's into drawings in order to create friends, and for George it's into a dolls house as a way of disposing of the things he is scared of or feels threatened by.

It is a superior story, as it employs some striking imagery like the living peg dolls, and has a lot more atmosphere - but it's common knowledge that children have little interest in watching characters of their own age, and adults aren't bothered about watching dramas featuring children.

The "atmosphere" of this episode actually led to it being shifted in the running order of the sixth series. It was supposed to fall in the first half of the series - so technically this is the Flesh Avatar Amy we're watching. Thinking there were too many "dark" episodes in the Spring, Night Terrors was swapped - with the equally dark pirate story.

Gatiss wanted to do a ghost story for Doctor Who, having written the supernatural series Crooked House. This multi-generational story told of weird happenings at an old house, and one involved a haunting in an ordinary modern house built on the site after it had been demolished.

His initial idea was a story revolving around different phobias. A psychiatrist conference would be held at a remote country hotel, with experts in phobias attending.

However, this was too close to the story which Toby Whithouse was working on - the one that would become The God Complex.

Giving it further thought, Gatiss hit on the idea that the scariest place in the world is a child's bedroom, and the action evolved to a tower block setting - one rarely featuring in the series.

Knowing of some couples who were struggling to start a family, he thought of an alien "cuckoo in the nest" scenario. These birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, in the expectation that they will rear their young for them.

The forenames of the family members came from a family Gatiss knew personally, whilst the nasty landlord - Purcell - was named after a hated PE teacher.

The monster of the piece is the aforementioned peg doll, of which we get different types. Gatiss explained that he had always found dolls creepy - especially the more crudely-made ones which only marginally resembled real people.

One assumes that Gatiss was aware of the 'Arthur's Seat Dolls', found by schoolboys in Edinburgh in 1836. A number of tiny, crudely-made dolls were found, stored in miniature coffins were dug up on the distinctive hill overlooking the city - remnant of a volcanic plug. It has been claimed by some that the dolls represent the victims of the notorious West Port murders - better known as the exploits of resurrectionists Burke and Hare.

Creepy dolls had featured in Doctor Who in the past, in stories such as The Celestial Toymaker and Terror of the Autons. With their painted faces they often resemble that other common phobic source - clowns. The "Unhappy Valley" syndrome applies to both - something which looks almost human, but not quite, is found to be disquieting and eerie.

Even supposedly "nice" dolls - like the ones seen in children's series Play School or Bagpuss - can unsettle.

Fans of Forteana will be aware of the number of cursed objects which just happen to be dolls, with portraits ("false" faces, again) coming a close second.

The title comes from Pavor Nocturnas. This is a common sleep disorder in which sufferers can appear to be awake and engaging in odd behaviours including sleep-walking / eating, as well as suffering from sleep paralysis, night sweats and vivid nightmares. It tends to last only 10 minutes or so, but can be longer for small children. It affects 5 - 10% of preschool children.

The Doctor mentions some favourite fairy tales, related to Doctor Who: The Three Little Pigs becomes "The Three Little Sontarans"; The Emperor's New Clothes becomes "The Dalek Emperor's New Clothes"; and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves becomes "Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday" - from the Terrance Dicks Dalek stage play from 1974.

Next time: The Doctor takes a back seat, so we get two Amy's and two Rory's instead. They're visiting a hospital where the staff can kill - but at least they do it with kindness...

Inspirations: Let's Kill Hitler

Let's Kill Hitler was the deliberately provocative title of the opening story of the second half of Series 6.

River Song's identity now having been revealed, this episode would go back and show the audience some of her history.

Having the Nazi leader's name in the title is obviously intended to provoke a reaction. Back in 2006, when the titles for Series 2 were being released, a number of religious groups expressed concern with The Satan Pit, thinking that the episode was going to feature the Christian Devil. Some people do find certain words or phrases triggering.

The series has encountered some troublesome story titles in the past. Victor  Pemberton's "Colony of Devils" - a fantastic title - was vetoed, lest it offend whatever passed for a 'snowflake' in 1968.

Perhaps Sea Devils were too obviously nothing to do with the Biblical Big Bad to warrant a title change, though Barry Letts had been advised to make sure that the Rev. Magister was hanging out in a cavern, and not a church crypt, just a few months previously.

Later, Chris Boucher's "The Day God Went Mad" - another fantastic title - also fell by the wayside.

The Fuhrer does feature in the episode, though only briefly and is quickly punched in the face by Rory then locked in a cupboard. His inclusion really isn't necessary for the story at all, nor does the 1930's Berlin setting.

It's the story of how the Ponds' baby grew up to be River Song, and the setting simply provides an interesting and potentially dangerous backdrop.

When asked where / when they would go if they had a time machine, going back and killing Hitler is one of the more common suggestions.

We discover that the schoolfriend of Amy and Rory - Mels - is actually their daughter. We're denied any information about who has brought her up, or how.

She ends up a juvenile delinquent and goes on a bit of a rampage, which includes trying to hijack the TARDIS - and this is where the title comes in.

Throwing the toy TARDIS into the air, and cutting to the real one, was inspired by the famous bone / spaceship segue in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The opening subtitle - "A Long Time Ago in Leadworth..." was a nod to the famous opening to the Star Wars movies.

Crop circles had been in the news since the 1980's, but there was a massive explosion of interest from the mid-1990's onwards as they became far more complex and widespread. They were believed by some to be the work of aliens, though fakers have shown how they achieved most.

At one point we see the Doctor, Amy and Rory framed through River's legs - imagery borrowed from The Graduate (1967). River is referred to as "Mrs Robinson" at one point, in case you didn't get the visual reference.

Mels fires a pistol inside the TARDIS - despite it having previously been stated that weapons couldn't be used due to the ship being in a form of "temporal grace". 

This first got mentioned in The Hand of Fear. Later, Nyssa questioned the Doctor about the use of Cyber-guns in the ship, but he doesn't answer, and we had seen how the console had been damaged by the Cybermen in the last story but one.

We've seen guns fired in the TARDIS in the interim - such as when Jack destroyed a Dalek in Parting of the Ways.

In this episode, the Doctor finally admits that he had been lying about this.

A significant role in the story is played by the Teselecta. This is a humanoid robotic construct, operated by a miniaturised crew.

The inspiration for this would be comic strip characters like The Numskulls, who made their debut in The Beezer in 1962.

They lived inside a man's head, operating his body. Later versions had them living and working inside a schoolboy.

There have been many variations of this, including another comic strip in which tiny people lived inside a TV set. A Far Side cartoon has a man opening up his radio to see a tiny string quartet within.

Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) (1972) had a segment featuring characters inside someone. There was also an early 1990's US sitcom named Herman's Head.

The Teselecta gets its name from the fact that it derives its outward appearance from tessellated blocks (from tesserae - the small coloured cubes which made up Roman mosaics).

The Anti-bodies are inspired by the 1966 sci-fi thriller Fantastic Voyage (one of the inspirations for our very own The Invisible Enemy).

In both, miniaturised people inside a body trigger the natural defence mechanism and are attacked by anti-bodies.

The bridge of the Teselecta is clearly supposed to mirror that of the Enterprise and other Federation starships of the Star Trek Universe.

Next time: it's back to the nursery for writer Mark Gatiss, as the TARDIS crew suffer a nasty case of pavor nocturnas...

Inspirations: A Good Man Goes To War

By splitting Series 6 in two, Steven Moffat was afforded the opportunity of having two season finales in the one year. A Good Man Goes To War marks the end of the first half, so it partially ties up some of the story arc strands, but also sets up a cliff-hanger to bring viewers back for the second half.

The mystery of the astronaut and the Doctor's apparent death on the shores of Lake Silencio will have to wait until later, but Moffat decides that it is finally time to reveal just who River Song is - something which has been left dangling since Series 4 when she was first introduced.

The episode also has to act as the resolution to the cliff-hanger from the previous story, when we learned that Amy had been abducted at some point and replaced with a Flesh avatar.

The Flesh carries on over to this story as we see that the baby is another copy.

The rapidity of Amy's pregnancy was originally going to be due to some form of temporal compression, but then Moffat hit on the idea of her having been kidnapped and replaced.

As the first married couple in the TARDIS, them having a child seemed the next logical step.

For villains, the mysterious "Eye-Patch Lady" had already been threaded through the season, and Moffat looked to his Series 5 episode Time of the Angels for the Headless Monks.

The museum in which the Byzantium's flight recorder had been found belonged to them.

Warrior Monks were inspired by the time of the Crusades, such as the Knights of St John and the Templars, and soldier-clerics had already been introduced in the same story.

The Monks would be like an elite force, above and beyond the Clerics.

To show that the stakes had been raised, and the Doctor would do anything to get Amy back, he would be seen to call in favours from a diverse range of friends.

Sadly, this group would comprise characters we had never seen the Doctor meet before. There had been some thoughts as to having Captain Jack feature, however.

Neve McIntosh had already played two Silurians in Series 5's The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood, so agreed to return as another of the same genetic clan.

Sontarans were single-minded soldiers, and the idea of one being a nurse was simply a jokey thing to do. Moffat claimed he always found them comical. Strax actually originated as another Sontaran - Skorm - in an unused Series 5 script by Gareth Roberts ("Death to the Doctor").

Dorium had already been seen briefly, with River Song, in The Pandorica Opens.

Giving each of the characters an introductory scene allowed for a bit of variety - with a fog-bound Victorian London and an alien battle zone.

The opening section also, memorably, features a cameo by the Cybermen. Their appearance shows that there are Cybus design Cybermen in our universe, as they do not have the "C" logo on their chests.

They are seen to have spaceships of the design first seen in The Invasion, as we also saw in The Pandorica Opens.

The Doctor's army features a lot of Silurians, though we don't know if they've been taken out of hibernation, come from prehistoric times, or originate from a future time when they co-exist with humans.

There is also a Platoon of Judoon - first seen in Smith and Jones.

Demon's Run comes under attack by a space-going spitfire - from Victory of the Daleks - and from earlier this series we have Captain Avery and his son Toby from Curse of the Black Spot.

In his script, Moffat described the interior of Demon's Run as being a combination of M*A*S*H and Battlestar Galactica.

Originally a 1970 movie by Robert Altman starring Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, M*A*S*H was developed into a hugely popular and long-running TV series (1972 - 83). It revolved around a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War.

It was the 2004 reimagining of Battlestar Galactica which Moffat was thinking of, rather than the original 1978 TV series by Glen A Larson.

We get to see a bit more of the Maldovarium, which was inspired by Rick's Bar in Casablanca (1942).

Next time: a provocative title. No-one actually kills Hitler, but we do get to see Rory punch him in the face...

Inspirations: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People two-parter was the latest in a long line of doppelganger stories, which went right back to 1965.

In The Chase, the First Doctor had encountered a deadly look-alike - an android copy created by the Daleks. The following year Hartnell played two roles in The Massacre, though the Doctor never actually met the Abbot of Amboise. He was a natural doppelganger.

The Second Doctor encountered lots of doubles in The Faceless Ones. In this instance, aliens were copying humans as a means of giving themselves new physical identities. The Doctor wasn't copied, though he did impersonate a Chameleon copy of himself. Jamie and Polly were copied.

He then met the would-be dictator Salamander in The Enemy of the World, another natural doppelganger of the Doctor.

More duplicate companions followed in The Mind Robber, when we saw fictionalised versions of Jamie and Zoe.

On the alternate Earth of the Inferno Project, the Doctor was threatened by mirror images of the Brigadier, Liz Shaw and Sergeant Benton.

The Nestene Consciousness did a lot of copying, but missed a trick by never copying the Doctor or his friends - nor did Axos.

The Zygons copied Harry Sullivan, whilst the Kraals copied just about everyone. Whilst the fake Harry was an alien in disguise, like the Chameleons, the latter were all android versions.

Harry was copied again, as was Benton, whilst we also saw androids of Sarah and the Fourth Doctor.

Not quite a doppelganger, but super-computer Xoanon did take on the Doctor's physiognomy as a projection of itself.

The Rutan on Fang Rock only copied one of the lighthouse keepers. 

We briefly saw two Doctor in the Bridge on Zanak, but one was simply a holographic projection. The following story had Romana lured over a cliff by a fake Doctor - but we never actually saw it.

It was her turn to meet doppelgangers - both artificial and natural - in The Androids of Tara. Mary Tamm would play four different characters in this - Romana, android Roman, Strella, and android Strella. There were more holographic copies of her at the end of the season.

The last duplicate of the Fourth Doctor's era was another alien copycat - Meglos. As with Salamander, the Doctor imitated his imitator.

A copy of Adric was created by the Master using Block Transfer Computation, whilst Nyssa met her natural doppelganger - Ann Talbot - in Black Orchid.

Omega temporarily took on the Fifth Doctor's appearance, and later he and Peri had android duplicates made of themselves by Sharaz Jek.

The Sixth Doctor wasn't around long enough for anyone to copy him, and the tenure of the Seventh only saw the odd holographic duplicate.

Once the series returned in 2005, it didn't take long for doubles to feature.

With another Nestene story kicking things off, we got a very unrealistic Auton copy of Mickey Smith, whilst his future wife, Martha, was cloned by the Sontarans.

When David Tennant did meet his doppelganger, it was a friendly one - his Meta-Crisis incarnation.

The Steven Moffat era launched with a story involving a copycat alien - Prisoner Zero.

This latest two-parter by Matthew Graham brings us up to date.

Here we have the sentient "Flesh", which can form exact copies of people linked psychically to it. All of the guest cast encounter Flesh avatars of themselves, as does the Doctor after coming into physical contact with it.

We think that only Amy and Rory are never copied - only to then discover that we've been watching a fake Amy since at least The Day of the Moon.

This is all part of the series story arc, which has been split into two halves this year. The Flesh part ends at the midway point.

Graham was the writer of Fear Her in Series 2 - one of the weakest stories of the modern era, and certainly the least liked Tennant episode. He had hoped to write for Series 5, but this was deferred to the next year. Initially planning just a single-parter, when asked to do Episodes 5 and 6 he was told he would need to have a second cliff-hanger leading into Episode 7, which would form the mid-season finale.

Moffat's two main inspirations were the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar (2009), and the 1982 film version of The Thing - John Carpenter's reimagining of the 1951 classic, which was based on John W Campbell's short story of 1938 Who Goes There?. The Thing From Another World had already inspired the opening section of The Seeds of Doom.

Graham wanted a monastery setting, inspired by The Name of the Rose (the 1986 film version of Umberto Eco's novel). Oddly, we get the setting - yet it's just the physical space, as the story is set in an industrial complex of the future.

Other inspirations included Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus for the creation of the Flesh avatars, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for the paranoia of not knowing which version is which - benign or malevolent, and the whole copying notion. The former was first published in 1818, whilst the latter was released in cinemas in 1956, with a remake following in 1978.

The image of the Flesh Jennifer with an elongated neck came from an 1865 illustration by John Tenniel for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The rotating head came from The Exorcist (1973).

Having a duplicate Doctor who also shared his memories allowed for snatches of dialogue from previous incarnations. 

This included Hartnell from An Unearthly Child, Pertwee from The Sea Devils ("reverse the polarity of the neutron flow") and Tom Baker offering a jelly baby from Robot.

The eye-patch lady makes a further appearance, having first been seen in The Day of the Moon.

Next time: the first half of the series comes to an end - but we don't get half the answers as to what is going on. Big revelations at last regarding River Song, a popular crime-fighting trio are introduced, and there's a lot of cameos as the Doctor gathers an army of friends who we've never actually heard of, whilst ignoring all the ones we would have seen had RTD still been in charge...

Inspirations: The Doctor's Wife

Back in the 1980's, producer JNT became annoyed at the number of spoilers which were finding their way into the fanzine domain. He was keen to engage with fandom, at least until it turned against him, and was happy to grant interviews - but some announcements he really wanted to manage himself, especially if they were newsworthy. He realised that many fans worked within the BBC - he even cast one in his first year, and commissioned another for a story - so decided to add the title "The Doctor's Wife" to his office planner - just to see where it might lead.

When Steven Moffat took over as showrunner, he approached a number of writers for story contributions. One of these was Neil Gaiman - one of the best known fantasy writers in the world.

He first came to fame - for my generation at least - with the BBC adaptation of his novel Neverwhere, which featured Peter Capaldi amongst its cast.

Globally, he now has a number of films, TV series and stage plays to his name, including collaborations with the late Terry Pratchett (e.g. Good Omens).

It was originally intended that Gaiman would write for Moffat's first series in charge, and it was decided early on that his story would revolve around the TARDIS. The Eccleston / Tennant TARDIS set was ordered retained especially for this.

In the end, the deadline got pushed back and the Gaiman story was to be produced for Series 6.

Doctors may come and go, and we've had dozens of companions, but the TARDIS is the one true constant throughout the entire history of Doctor Who.

It has enjoyed comparatively few changes of appearance in 60 years, both inside and out. The console rooms alter design - referenced in this episode as its "desktop theme". To the casual viewer, the Police Public Call Box shell has never changed, though we fans can spot varying shades of blue or changes in dimensions.

When DWM produced a special looking at the companions, for the 50th Anniversary, once it had covered Susan to Clara, it ended with a look at the TARDIS - arguing rightly that it has always been as much a companion to the Doctor over the centuries as any schoolteacher, UNIT soldier or Time Lady.

It has been a character in its own right ever since The Edge of Destruction - though you could argue it was exhibiting very odd behaviours since it decided to wait and warn the Doctor about the radiation dangers of Skaro only after everyone had already been infected - and then it chose to do so silently.

In the following two-part story, it elected to warn everyone of the peril they faced when one of its components became stuck - but it did so in the most cryptic manner possible.

You'd think it didn't like any of them.

Over the years we've learned a lot more about it, in terms of its "personality". It is definitely much more than a machine. It has telepathic circuits and some form of psychic bond with its operator.

The Doctor certainly speaks to it, and of it, like a person - specifically a 'she'.

This was the background against which Gaiman crafted his story - initially known as "Bigger on the Inside". (Other working titles were "The TARDIS Trap" and "The House of Nothing").

What would happen if the Doctor could actually "meet" the TARDIS and interact with it? What would they have to say to each other?

One of his inspirations was the novel The Most Dangerous Game (1924). It's best known for the 1932 film version starring Fay Wray, Leslie Banks and Joel McCrea - a companion piece to King Kong in production terms. 

In this a sadistic big game hunter stalks human prey after they become marooned on his private island. (The crazed villain of the piece is called Zaroff...).

Gaiman liked the idea of the companion being hunted through the endless corridors and rooms of the TARDIS. (Not the Doctor, however, as he would know the ship too well).

The being doing the hunting would be the TARDIS itself, which led to the idea of it becoming possessed by a hostile alien entity - which in turn led to the idea of its own "personality" being transplanted somewhere else.

The notion of a sentient TARDIS had been covered in spin-off media, but never properly explored on screen.

Having the House planet look like a gigantic junkyard was a deliberate nod to the series' origins in Totters Lane - since Gaiman wanted the episode to be a love letter to the series and to long-term fans.

Originally there were lots of little references, such as mention of the mercury fluid-links, but these were cut. A Dalek sucker was to have been found by Amy.

The white Time Lord message cube was first seen in The War Games.

An opening scene was supposed to show Amy and Rory in the TARDIS swimming pool, but this was cut as the budget was tightened - though Gaiman was told it was because Karen Gillan couldn't swim. The pool - described as a bathroom - had been seen in The Invasion of Time, only to be said to have been jettisoned by the time of Paradise Towers.

It was back, but unseen, in the new series - getting a mention in The Eleventh Hour when it had spilled into the library. It was intact for River to plunge into at the beginning of this series.

The "desktop theme" description had first been used by Moffat in Time Crash for Children in Need.

House was a disembodied entity as Gaiman loved creatures like the Great Intelligence (he is a big Troughton era fan). In the original version, House had come into our universe through the Crack.

This was reversed to have it exist in a bubble universe - similar to E-Space from Season 18 - and want to leave for our universe to feed. 

Burning up rooms to create thrust had been seen in Logopolis and Castrovalva.

Nephew was going to be a big new creature - a huge hulking brute who was part-hyena - but cost-cutting also saw that thrown out in favour of reusing an existing Ood costume.

The junkyard TARDIS was the latest collaboration with Blue Peter - the result of a competition for young fans to design a console made from discarded items.

This competition was run prior to Series 5 where the story was supposed to be placed.

It was Gaiman rather than the showrunner who added the mention that the Corsair had once been female, indicating for the first time that Time Lords could change gender.

Next time: Shiny (Un)Happy People...

Inspirations: Curse of the Black Spot

The Curse of the Black Spot is a prequel to the 1966 William Hartnell story The Smugglers, only in that it shows an adventure with pirate captain Henry Avery. It's claimed in the Season 3 story that he is long dead - but of course it may simply be that he's off exploring outer space with his son and his final Earthbound crew.

Like The Smugglers, it is also very much a genre-history story, in that it tries to cram in lots of stereotypical pirate lore - from fiction and real life.

Henry Every, aka Avery, who was known as "King of the Pirates", was born in August 1659.

Like many of his contemporaries, he started off as a legitimate sailor serving with the Navy, but realised over time that he could make more money on the wrong side of the law. His first move was into the slave trade - so it's disturbing that the series makes him out to become a friend of the Doctor's.

Piracy followed a successful mutiny and seizure of the Charles II, which became the Fancy.

The mention of the Grand Mughul's treasure refer to events in 1695 when Avery captured a pair of Indian ships laden with loot - the biggest prize ever won by any pirate captain.

Whilst the fate of most pirates is known - killed in action or captured and executed - Avery simply disappeared after 1696. One rumour had it that he died in poverty back in England after being embezzled of his share of the treasure.

Another rumour had him settle in the Americas. Coins from the treasure have turned up in Rhode Island, and it's known that some of his crew made it to New England.

Whilst known to have married, there is no record of him ever having any children, let alone a son named Toby.

Interestingly, if you do Google Images for Avery, Hugh Bonneville in this story seems to have been adopted as an image of the historical figure (left):

The "Black Spot" derives from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which includes the most famous literary pirate - Long John Silver. The spot in the novel is a mark on a piece of parchment which signals that the person given it is doomed to die.

Walking the plank is a popular form of execution for pirates in fiction (previously seen in The Pirate Planet and Enlightenment), but it has its roots in fact.

It was used both by and against mutineers (mentions going back to the mid-18th Century), only becoming popular with pirates in the 19th Century.

The Siren proves to be a misguided automated medical system - something we'll see again very soon in the second half of the series.

In Greek mythology - namely The Odyssey - they appear to be beautiful women with alluring voices. They enticed sailors to their doom as their ships crashed onto the rocks. Their voices were also said to drive people insane (as in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad). In ancient times they had the upper portions of women, with the lower parts those of a bird - with or without wings.

It was only later in the Medieval period that they transformed into mermaid-like creatures with fish tails.

A Cornish mermaid tale - the Mermaid of Zennor - was one of the main inspirations for the writer, Steve Thompson.

Rory dies yet again, and is brought back to life yet again, and we have an appearance by the mysterious Eye-Patch Lady, who will form part of the story arc for the first half of the season, which was to be split in two sections either side of the Summer.

Next time: The Doctor finally gets to meet the true love of his life...

Inspirations: The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon

The location came first.

Steven Moffat was looking for something big to launch his second series in charge and thought that a story filmed overseas - the US in particular - would make an impact. He had in mind a story set in the USA during the 1960's, which would use a number of iconic landmarks, including New York City.

For the story itself, an incident would occur which would run through the entire season - more than just a word or phrase as a story arc.

The Big Bang had left plot threads dangling, so these would be picked up in this series.

The location was a deliberate move to please American fans, but Moffat wasn't aiming the story at that market. As he said at the time, US fans liked the Britishness of Doctor Who, and the programme was already doing well in the territory anyway.

With Cape Kennedy being a key location in the scripts, locations in Florida were considered (hence the setting for the children's home), and Mount Rushmore was also a possibility, but in the end Utah and Arizona were selected as affording some iconic landscapes which could not be replicated in South Wales.

The Silence came next. Moffat wanted a creature that could become as iconic as the Weeping Angels. He hit on the idea of something which, when you looked away from it, you forgot you'd seen it - feeling that this was suitably creepy and alarming.

"Silence will fall" had been a running phrase throughout Series 5, its relevance unexplained so far.

This led to the notion that an invasion had taken place a very long time ago, but the human race were unaware as they kept forgetting.

For the look of the creatures, he looked to Edvard Munch's The Scream (Skrik, 1893). This in turn led to the popular image of extra-terrestrials, known as "Greys", reported by UFO witnesses since the 1950's.

Putting them in conventional black suits tied in with the "Men in Black", also associated with UFO's and ET's.

Area 51 - the "non-existent" section of the USAF base at Groom Lake, Nevada - became another obvious location, seen in the second episode.

The fashion also fitted with the late 1960's setting.

Once America in the 1960's was decided upon, the obvious setting was the Moon landing in 1969. On checking who the POTUS was, he found it was the controversial Richard Milhous Nixon. He was to fall during the Watergate scandal a couple of years later - so Moffat included this in his script. The Doctor advises the President to record all of his conversations in the Oval Office because of the calls from the mysterious child.

A fan of The West Wing, Moffat wanted the Doctor to first meet Nixon in the Oval Office of the White House.

It was also decided that River Song would feature once again, and she would be integral to the full series arc - though it wouldn't be obvious just yet.

As a big shock factor, Moffat then decided to open the series with a death - and this time it would be the Doctor himself who was to be killed.

The audience were told that this was not a trick. He really would be shot dead, with no chance of a quick regeneration.

The image of an astronaut, face obscured, emerging from a lake in the middle of a desert, during a picnic, was just too surreal not to use.

Amy's pregnancy was also introduced - again with no clue for viewers as to the importance of this to the arc.

Working titles were "Year of the Moon" and "Look Behind You".

It was one of Moffat's sons who helped come up with the final titles as he thought these "too cheesy", and his dad could do better.

The custodian of the Gothic children's home was named Renfrew, as a nod to psychiatric inmate Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Moffat had trouble describing the tally marks in his scripts, and ended up having to download a new font for his word processor to cope with them.

The Silents' spaceship - an unused TARDIS design concept - was reused from The Lodger.

The opening section saw the Doctor in a variety of settings including appearing in a Laurel & Hardy movie (The Flying Deuces, 1939); encounter with King Charles II; and as a POW in a WWII German camp. He escapes from the Tower of London - from whence he and Susan had earlier fled in the reign of Henry VIII.

At one point the Doctor exclaims "Space - 1969!" - a reference to Gerry Anderson's series Space:1999.

Next time: Shiver me timbers and heave-ho, me hearties! It's a prequel to a late William Hartnell story (sort of...).

Story 226 - The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

In which the Doctor finds himself on an alien spaceship which is about to attack and destroy the Earth. He sabotages the vessel but gets cut off from the TARDIS. He is forced to don a protective impact suit and leap from the exploding ship into space. he plunges to the Earth below, where is is found by a woman named Madge Arwell, who agrees to give him a lift to where the TARDIS has materialised. This is England, in 1938. Madge drops him at a Police Call Box, never seeing what he looks like due to the suit's helmet being on backwards. After she has gone, the Doctor discovers that it is a real Police Box and not his ship. Madge returns home to her family, where husband Reg is worried about rumours of war in the newspapers.

Three years later, Madge has just received news that Reg is missing in action. He was a Lancaster bomber pilot. She decides not to tell her children - Lily and Cyril - as she wants them to have one last happy Christmas before learning the tragic news. They have arranged to stay away from London at Uncle Digby's sprawling country house. Digby is away at the moment, and they are greeted by the Doctor, who is posing as the caretaker. He has made some adaptations to the property, including lemonade on tap and filling the rooms with toys and games. In the main living room is an elaborate Christmas tree, under which is a large blue box, which must not be opened until Christmas Day.

Madge admits to the Doctor that her husband is dead, but she has not told the children yet. 

That night, the curious Cyril decides that he cannot wait to find out what the blue box contains. He sneaks downstairs and opens the package - and discovers that it contains a tunnel. He crawls through and finds himself in a snowbound forest, under bright moonlight. Lily realises that her brother has gone and goes to the living room, where she meets the Doctor. He realises that Cyril has gone into the box, so he and Lily must follow and find him. The box acts as a portal to another planet, in the 54th Century. There is a temporal difference to the tunnel, so Cyril will have been on the planet longer than the few minutes since he went into the box. Silver spheres grow on the trees, and the Doctor catches a glimpse of a wooden figure in one. One of these spheres has hatched out, and they see massive footprints in the snow, along with Cyril's. Madge has discovered that her children have disappeared from their room, and searching she also comes across the box. She crawls through and arrives in the forest. Exploring, she comes across a large machine which towers over the forest on giant legs. She is confronted by its three person crew - Droxil, Ven-Garr and Billis. 

They explain that they come from the planet Androzani Major and their job is to harvest these trees. Satellites above this planet are about to cover the surface with acid to melt the forest down. Madge takes control over the harvester vehicle, determined to find her children. The harvesters teleport up to their mothership, leaving Madge to attempt to drive the vehicle. The Doctor and Lily, meanwhile, have followed the footprints to a tall tower. They see what appears to be a huge carved wooden figure of a king seated within. They go up the stairs to a dome at the summit, where they find Cyril with another carved figure - this one resembling a queen. She holds a circlet which she places on Cyril's head as he sits on a central throne. The wooden king comes up the stairs to join them. It appears that they figures cannot get what they want from Cyril. The acid begins to rain down on the forest and the Doctor and Lily see millions of tiny lights emerge from the trees. The harvester then arrives, driven erratically by Madge. It crashes to the ground, and she hurries into the tower.

The Doctor realises that the trees contain lifeforms which have animated the king and queen, to find them a means of escaping the destruction of the forest. They require a pilot to fly the dome from the top of the tower. Madge discovers that she is the ideal candidate for this, as she is a mother. The tree lifeforms enter the dome as it takes off. Madge longs to return to Earth and so this is where the ship travels. En route, she thinks of her husband, and in his aircraft - lost over the Channel and about to run out of fuel - Reg sees the sphere ahead of him, giving him something to aim for. The strange ship arrives outside Uncle Digby's house on Christmas morning, and Madge is delighted to see that a Lancaster bomber has landed nearby. She is reunited with Reg. The tree lifeforms have departed to a new home. That night, Madge goes to the attic to see the Doctor, and finds he has the TARDIS there. She realises that he was the spaceman whom she had helped back in 1938. She encourages him not to be alone at Christmas, and to go and find his friends.

The TARDIS arrives outside Amy and Rory's house, where his one-time travelling companions reveal that they have always kept a place for him every Christmas since they last saw him, two years ago, in the hope that he will visit...

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 25th December, 2011. It is Moffat's second Christmas Special, and once again its inspiration is a literary one - this time C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950.

The clue is in the title, obviously, but Lewis' story also deals with children evacuated from London to avoid German bombing, going to stay at the home of their uncle Digory. A magical wardrobe contains a portal to the land of Narnia, where time moves at a different rate to that back at the house. This story has a blue box act as the passageway to a magical planet - clearly a metaphor for the TARDIS.

C.S. Lewis's death was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK, one the eve of Doctor Who's first broadcast, and many have seen his story as a major inspiration for the programme, where the TARDIS acts like his wardrobe.

As with his previous Christmas Special, the Doctor is given a one-off companion by Moffat - something which RTD usually did as companions departed at the end of the previous season. Amy and Rory have not left the series yet, but they have stopped travelling with him on a regular basis and now live in the house he set up for them at the end of The God Complex. As such, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill only appear in the coda, set in the present day.

The companion role is primarily filled by Madge Arwell, played by Claire Skinner. She is best known for her long-running role in the BBC sitcom Outnumbered. She is separated from the Doctor for much of the story, so the Doctor also has to interact with Lily Arwell as a surrogate companion. She's played by Holly Earl, who was fresh from a recurring role in Casualty. Maurice Cole plays her brother Cyril.

Portraying Reg is the other main guest artist Alexander Armstrong. He had been voicing Sarah Jane Smith's computer Mr Smith for the previous 5 years, in The Sarah Jane Adventures as well as The Stolen Earth / Journey's End.

Other guest artists, who are wasted in what are little more than cameo appearances, are Bill Bailey, Paul Bazely and Arabella Weir, as the trio of Androzani harvesters. Bailey is a well known stand-up comedian, as well as being an actor, who first came to prominence in the C4 sitcom Black Books. Bazely is best known for a recurring role in ITV comedy series Benidorm, whilst Weir once payed an alternative female Doctor on audio. They are there to provide some comic relief, but unfortunately just aren't remotely funny.

The Wooden King is played by Spencer Wilding, who had played the Minotaur in the previous series (and who was the new Darth Vader in Rogue One), whilst the Wooden Queen is Paul Kasey.

The Special did have a prequel, which is in many ways more entertaining than the episode itself. This featured the Doctor on the alien spaceship (the species never seen or named, though they must be humanoid judging by the impact suit which the Doctor later uses). He calls Amy and Rory in the TARDIS for help, before remembering that they are no longer with him.

Overall, the weakest Christmas Special we've been offered. There's just no real threat. It's one thing to use something as an inspiration, but another to lazily make it more of a wholesale steal. We've said before how stories which focus more on children just aren't very popular. The DWM 50th Anniversary poll had this in 229th place (out of 241). It is the lowest ranked Christmas Special, and the second lowest rated Matt Smith story overall.

Things you might like to know:

• This is the only episode which features Karen Gillan (discounting The Time of the Doctor where she cameos only) not to have her name in the opening titles. That credit goes to Skinner.
• The 2012 Christmas Special will have a character named Digby - one of Clara's young charges. There is a fan theory that he grows up to be the Uncle Digby referred to here.
• Originally Lily Arwell was going to be called Lucy, after one of the Pevensie children in the Narnia stories. Moffat changed his mind as he thought it would show the inspiration too much, despite the story overall being clearly inspired by Lewis.
• Claire Skinner is married to director Charles Palmer, who has directed a number of Doctor Who stories from Smith and Jones to The Eaters of Light. Her father-in-law, therefore, is Geoffrey Palmer, who made three appearances in Doctor Who.
• As well as playing a female version of the Doctor, Weir was once David Tennant's landlady, when he first moved to London for work. He is godfather to one of her children.
• Bill Bailey, a long-time fan of the show, once composed a jazz version of the Doctor Who theme, which he called 'Doctor Qui'.

Story 225 - The Wedding of River Song

In which the whole of history becomes frozen at 5:02:57 pm on 22nd April, 2011. Dinosaurs co-exist with the Wars of the Roses, Charles Dickens is promoting his latest Christmas Special on daytime TV, and Winston Churchill is the Holy Roman Emperor. Like some, Churchill is aware that there is something wrong with Time. He orders that a prisoner be brought to him from the Tower of London - a ragged soothsayer who has been warning of this. He is the Doctor. He tells Churchill that the freezing of time was all due to a woman...
After his visit to Craig Owens in Colchester the Doctor had set out to try and find out as much as he could about the Order known as The Silence, before having to face his fate at Lake Silencio. Information from a Dalek database leads him to the space docks of the planet Calisto B, where he meets a former member of the Silence - Gideon Vandaleur. Like Madame Kovarian, he wears a black eye-patch. After a short discussion, the Doctor reveals that he knows Gideon to be a fake. The real Vandaleur is dead. He is really a Teselecta, once again commanded by Captain Carter, who the Doctor had spoken with in Berlin.
The Doctor is pointed towards a man named Gantok. Before leaving, the Doctor tells Carter that there is a favour he may be able to do for him. The Doctor then meets Gantok over a game of live chess - played with electrified pieces. The Doctor allows him to win - saving his life as he was on the point of defeat - if he can take the Doctor to the Silence. Gantok takes him to the subterranean Seventh Transept, where the Headless Monks have kept their severed craniums for centuries.

This is really a trap, but Gantok falls into a pt of skulls which eat him alive. Venturing further in, the Doctor finds the casket containing the head of Dorium Maldovar. Very much alive, he agrees to help the Doctor, and is taken aboard the TARDIS. Dorium tells the Doctor about a legend about the fall of the Eleventh, on the fields of Trenzalore, where no man may speak falsely, when a question will be asked which must never be answered - a question hidden in plain sight. The Doctor does not know what this signifies. Lake Silencio was chosen for the Doctor's demise as it could be made into a fixed point in time, which could never be altered or undone. Dorium remarks about the Doctor's current solitary existence, him having pushed Amy and Rory and other friends away. The Doctor decides to call up his old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart - only to learn that he has recently passed away. The news causes the Doctor to finally accept his fate.
When the Doctor finally catches up with Amy, Rory and River Song - 200 years after he last saw them - events at the lakeside do not go as they should, however. The earlier River emerges from the waters hidden in her spacesuit, but she refuses to kill him. The Doctor insists she go ahead as otherwise all of time and space will be fractured. She disregards him - and history becomes stuck at that exact moment in time.

Back at Churchill's Buckingham Senate House, the Doctor has been telling the Emperor of these events. They suddenly find themselves brandishing weapons, with no memory of why they have them. The Doctor then notices that they have tally marks written on them - the method previously employed to warn of having had contact with the Silents. They are attacked by a group of the creatures, but are saved by the arrival of Amy Pond - dressed in military style and wearing an eye-patch. She sedates the Doctor and he wakes later to find himself on a train travelling to Area 52, which is built within an Egyptian pyramid. Amy has retained memories of her travels with the Doctor, but is unaware that her lieutenant - Rory Williams - is really her husband. The Doctor is given an eye-patch, which Amy explains are really eye-drives - small memory devices which allow the wearer to remember seeing the Silents. At Area 52 the Doctor is reunited with River Song, who has Madame Kovarian prisoner. The base also contains a number of captive Silents, held in tanks of fluid to suppress their deadly electrical powers. River has been working on a plan to get time moving again, and scientists notice that time moves forward by a second when she and the Doctor touch. The Doctor blames her for causing all of this by not killing him. Kovarian seems undaunted by her predicament. She reveals that she has set a trap. The eye-drives have been hacked and they start to attack their wearers with electrical shocks which grow more powerful by the minute. The Silents are not as powerless as they believe, and they begin to break out of their tanks and attack the base personnel.

River takes the Doctor up to the summit of the pyramid whilst Rory holds the Silents back. Kovarian finds her own eye-drive is now attacking her. Amy helps Rory destroy the Silents, then she abandons Kovarian to die from her sabotaged eye-drive. She and Rory then join the Doctor and River at the pyramid apex where a transmitter has been set up. This is designed to call out to the universe for people who know the Doctor to offer help. However, the Doctor knows of only one thing which will put history back on course. He then asks River to marry him - witnessed by her parents. He whispers something to her, which shocks her, then they kiss - and time begins to move again.
At Lake Silencio, River shoots the Doctor, and his corpse is later burned.
Some time later, at the home of Amy and Rory, River comes to visit. She has just come from the wreck of the Byzantium on Alfava Metraxis. She tells Amy that the Doctor is not really dead. When he whispered to her it was to tell her to look into his eye - where she saw a miniaturised Doctor inside a Teselecta made to look like him. It was this which was shot and burned. As far as the rest of the universe is concerned, the Doctor was killed and the fixed point in time maintained. River must complete her prison sentence to keep the illusion. He has taken himself off, to keep a low profile for a while.
The Doctor, meanwhile, takes Dorium's head back to the Seventh Transept. As he leaves, Dorium asks a question of the Doctor's true identity - "Doctor Who?"...

The Wedding of River Song was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 1st October, 2011. It marks the end of Series 6. It is the first time since the series returned that the finale has not been the concluding half of a two-parter.
As a series finale you might be forgiven for thinking that there will be some revelations, and some resolutions. The only thing resolved is the cheat of the Doctor's escape from his apparent death, as seen in the series opener. It wasn't the Doctor who was killed, but his Teselecta double. Whilst you can understand bystanders believing him to be dead, it is hard to comprehend how 'Time' can be fooled by this. How can a simple substitution get round this "fixed point in time", when River's refusal to play ball can freeze the whole of history. Moffat assured us that the Doctor really was killed in the opening story. No cheating. Like his predecessor, the showrunner lies, if it serves the story-telling or conceals spoilers.
There aren't really any revelations in this story either, unfortunately. We already knew that the Silence was an Order whose purpose was to stop a question being answered, and they are prepared to kill the Doctor (by assassination or by blowing up the TARDIS) to make sure that he, specifically, doesn't answer the question. Who they are and exactly why they are doing this is left unexplained. We know as much as we did at the halfway stage of the series. What the question is, however, we kind of guess from the closing seconds of the episode ("Doctor who?!.."), but of course everyone assumed that there had to be more to it than that. Instead of tying up story arcs, we get them added to, as Dorium tells the Doctor of the prophesy involving the Fall of the Eleventh, the field of Trenzalore, and people being unable to tell an untruth. In hindsight, Moffat will pull all of this together - but just not now. To the unresolved mysteries of Series 5 are added the unresolved mysteries of Series 6.

Not only does the story satisfy as a series finale, it doesn't really work as an episode either. As mentioned previously, this is the first time that we have only had a single episode finale, and I said when looking at Closing Time that fans were worried that this would mean that the closing episode would have an awful lot to fit in. By not offering any expected resolution, you might have expected that the story would have worked as a self-contained adventure in its own right - but this is not the case. To be honest, it is a bit of a dog's dinner. Moffat seems to have had a lot of ideas that weren't quite big enough, or good enough, to warrant development as stories in their own right - so he just chucked them into this. We start with the whole mix-up of history, which is quite entertaining and allows for the return of some old guests stars, but then we switch to more of the Doctor on his farewell journey. Back to mixed up history, and then this segment simply vanishes, as the Doctor goes off to the pyramid to have an entirely different adventure with Madame Kovarian and the Silents. The titular wedding seems to come out of nowhere, and is only really there to justify a story title Moffat thought sounded good, and play to fan speculation about the relationship between River and the Doctor. Did he really have to marry her to show that he was the Teselecta all along, when we know that just touching each other can start history moving again?
Building on something which RTD had started, Moffat has more and more been making the Doctor into some sort of universal celebrity, and that reaches its nadir here in the scene where River explains that the whole universe is offering to help him. It might have been intended as an uplifting moment, but I find it sentimentally overblown and embarrassingly naff.

Technically, none of the regulars really plays themselves in this. The Doctor is a Teselecta for much of the running time, whilst River, Amy and Rory are all alternate versions.
The story sees a lot of returning characters - some going back to the first series. There is a cameo from Simon Callow reprising Charles Dickens (The Unquiet Dead), speaking on the BBC's Breakfast Time with real presenters about his new "Christmas Special". Then we have Ian McNeice returning to play Winston Churchill. He has a Silurian physician, and it's Dr Malokeh from The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood - played once again by Richard Hope (who once auditioned to be the Doctor). Richard Dillane is then seen once more as Captain Carter, commander of the Teselecta. Under heavy prosthetics, as Gantok, is Mark Gatiss in an uncredited cameo. Simon Fisher-Becker returns as Dorium Maldovar, in reduced circumstances and despite having been killed in A Good Man Goes To War. He spends the entire episode as a head in a box, and is another element simply forgotten about when the episode switches to the Area 52 section. In a flashback to the events at Lake Silencio, we also catch another glimpse of William Morgan Sheppard as the older Canton Delaware III. The only other role of note is Niall Greig Fulton, recently seen (or rather heard) as Satan in Good Omens, as Gideon Vandaleur. The main guest artist, however, is the principal villain - the return of Frances Barber as Madame Kovarian. Moffat at least gives us the satisfaction of killing her off, and at the hands of Amy Pond as well - at least in the sense that she deliberately refuses to save her when she has the opportunity.

One actor who is missing, despite his character having a significant role to play, is Nicholas Courtney. He had dies at the beginning of the year, and the programme paid tribute by having the Doctor learn of his old friend's death - in bed, as an old man, as he had known would happen way back in Battlefield. RTD always regretted never finding a cameo for him in Doctor Who, but had used him on The Sarah Jane Adventures, and it had been hoped that he might have featured in that series again with Death of the Doctor, but he was already far too ill.
Sadly, this touching scene will be thoroughly trashed later when Moffat decides to bring him back as a reanimated corpse who's been turned into a Cyberman. It's a science fiction series about a time traveller, Steven. There are far less stupid and insulting ways to save a character falling out of a crashing aeroplane.

Overall - well I think you should be able to guess what I think of this one. A disjointed mess, that fails to satisfy on almost every level. I'm not the only one to think so. This was the lowest rated series finale in the DWM 50th Anniversary poll by a long way - coming in at 129th place. All the others lie within the top 55 places.
Things you might like to know:

• This episode had a prequel, which consisted of shots of the stuck clock, and the soldiers in Area 52 with the Silents stirring in their tanks.
• Mark Gatiss used the name Rondo Haxton for his credit - an homage to Universal horror actor Rondo Hatton, who is best remembered for his role as the "Hoxton Creeper" in Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death (1944).
• The newspaper proclaiming that the Wars of the Roses have gone into their second year is the "Londinium Cotide". Cotidie is Latin for "Daily".
• Amongst the images of London stuck in time we have cars flying around suspended from balloons. Everything else we see comes from history, but we've never had flying balloon cars. They can't be from the future, as the whole point is that time is stuck at 5:02:57 on 22nd April, 2011 - the future can't happen. Also, if everything is happening at once then London should both exist and not exist at the same time.
• The sequence of the pterosaurs in the park may be a reference to the novelisation of Invasion of the Dinosaurs - which featured children going missing in parks due to dinosaurs.
• Just when we think that we've finally had a season in which the Daleks fail to appear, we get a cameo from a wrecked New Paradigm Dalek Supreme (repainted a greyish colour).
• Another possible tribute to Nicholas Courtney is that everyone in this story wears an eye-patch? This refers to Courtney's favourite convention anecdote, from the set of 1970's Inferno.
• As well as the BBC's Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams playing themselves, we also see US TV anchor Meredith Vieira as another newscaster. She was in the UK to make a segment about the show for the Today programme, and was offered the chance of a cameo. Her piece featured Cybermen - leading many to believe that they would feature in this episode.
• As well as being the only series finale since 2005 to consist of only a single episode, it is also the only one not to feature the TARDIS interior for its closing scene.
• Sadly, there is no such magazine as Knitting for Girls, just in case you might want to seek it out. I did - purely for the Spot the Ball competition of course.