Okay, whoops, I was out again last night and forgot to cue up this beforehand. I’m presuming most of you have seen last night’s ep by now, but if you haven’t already talked it out on Twitter or anywhere elsewhere, feel free to get some discussion going while you wait for Ben to show up with his review later in the week.

It was almost exactly a year ago, when reviewing “Flesh and Stone”, that I said:
“The Pandorica?” he says, bringing this year’s plot keyword front and centre. “That’s just a fairy tale.” To which the only answer, of course – as Murray Gold’s lovely recurring bit of Harry Potter-esque score strikes up – is “Aren’t we all?” We know this is how Moffat sees Who (hasn’t he just hired the world’s foremost writer of fairy tales for series six?)…
Even when saying that, though, I’m not sure entirely what I expected of a Gaiman-written Doctor Who. Yes, his unique sensibilities seemed to fit perfectly with the sort of thing Moffat was doing on occasion last year – but even so, he’d be reined in a bit, surely? That Babylon 5 episode aside, he’s never really done “sci-fi” before, instead trading largely in (mythical and urban) fantasy. Sure, parts of Neverwhere – the parts with the Marquis de Carabas in – felt like a Who story that never was, but that was still very firmly a world away in voice and setting. Working on a time-travel adventure series rooted heavily in science and logic would surely require a shift in approach and tone – just to avoid the feeling that you’ve been shoehorned in just because of who you are, rather than because of your expected ability to write good Doctor Who – wouldn’t it?

Well, not if you’re Neil Gaiman. If you’re Neil Gaiman, instead of doing that, you turn out – wonderfully, gloriously, at least for people like this correspondent, who had their worldview irrevocably shaped by the discovery of Sandman in their mid-teens – the most Neil Gaimanish thing you’ve done in a decade. Good Doctor Who – great, almost peerless modern age Doctor Who – but also a great big fairy tale at the same time. “The Boy Whose Favourite Toy Spoke To Him.”

Pay attention, 007. This is fun.

Remember the “Bad Wolf” website game in 2005? Where, beginning with the “Who Is Doctor Who?” website, the BBC would update week on week with something new, dropping clues as to the nature of that big plot thread thing that turned out actually not to be any of the things we thought it was going to be?

Well, they’re at it again. Possible SPOILERS after the jump.

Sandman. Neverwhere. Stardust. American Gods. The Graveyard Book. Coraline. Anansi Boys.

The Doctor’s Wife? Find out tonight.

So, it’s an episode immediately following – but not picking up on – that cliffhanger, and immediately preceding one written by Neil Gaiman. Sort of on a hiding to nothing, really, isn’t it? Anyway, let’s put all thoughts of series arcs to one side, and this could still be enjoyable – pirates! Hugh Bonneville! Lily “Flatface” Cole! And if there’s no reference to Jack Sparrow anywhere in the episode, I’ll be very surprised.

As ever (except for last week when we FORGOT), post your chatter below and we’ll have a review proper at some point later in the week.

So when Julian talked last week about a sea change in what Doctor Who is and what it’s all about, I don’t think even he realised just how far that idea was going to go. Because now we’ve got the next step – stories that simply defy being written or talked about as individual episodes, that are inextricably linked with the bigger picture to an extent not yet seen in six years of the revived show. Just about everything worth discussing in “Day of the Moon” can only be discussed within the context of things we haven’t yet been shown or told – and the reaction coming out of the episode is so heavily buried in the frenetic excitement of trying to figure out what it all means, and what’s going to happen next, that I’m initially entirely unsure as to whether the preceding 45 minutes of television were actually any good in their own right or not.

This’ll probably be quite good then, what?

You know how this works by now. Thread for all your comments/discussion below, and then a Proper Review in a couple of days’ time. GO.

As we gear up for what promises to be one of Doctor Who‘s most exciting series, it’s hard for things not to be overshadowed by the absence of two of the programme’s dearest friends.

We posted a brief tribute to Nicholas Courtney after his passing earlier this year, but the untimely death of Elisabeth Sladen has shaken us even further. Others have paid tribute in far more elegant and correct fashion than we could hope to, so all I can really add is that she, along with Nicholas, will be sorely missed. That she was able to become a hero to countless children across the country entirely independently of her appearances in Who itself is testament to what a brilliant, lively, wonderful and inspiring figure she was. It’s arguable that she has had a greater impact on Doctor Who than any actor outside of its lead eleven, and she has been taken from us far too soon.
Elisabeth Sladen 1946-2011
The Doctor’s best friend – and all of ours, too

And so the dance begins again. With the launch of a new series of Who a matter of weeks away, suddenly we’ve been hit by all manner of promotional images, blurbs, video clips and so on – making the urge to sit and figure out what it all means an irresistible one. It’s often a futile game, and there’s an argument – one that I’m sort of coming around to – that it’s better off just to keep away from the forums, the set reports and the endless fan-fictiony predictions of what the plots might be that litter Gallifrey Base around this time of year, and instead just sit back and enjoy the episodes as they come. It’s especially pertinent when it comes to Moffat, who’s already shown a singular inclination towards wrong-footing the viewers, and building complex and misleading plots that can’t be pieced together simply by people standing watching location filming with a camera phone.

Nevertheless, it can be fun, particularly if you lay down various predictions about what things mean and they turn out to be utterly, utterly wrong. With that in mind, I’m laying on the table everything that I think is the case about the first seven episodes of the series, and I fully expect to be proven wrong on most of them. But to enjoy being proven wrong and having my expectations confounded. Because there’s only one prediction that really matters, and that we all know will come true: MoffatWho is going to be bloody spectacular.

Note of course that after the jump there will be spoilers – nothing much that hasn’t been seen in trailers, mind (if I end up getting anything right, I assure you it’s a lucky guess), but if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing you might want to avoid reading any further. And I’m also aware that the opening two-parter has now been seen in its entirety by a number of people – so please, if you happen to be one of those people, don’t spoil the game by giving away anything that’s either right or wrong out of the below. With that in mind, and with a healthy pinch of salt at the ready, let’s see what we think we know…

Okay, I’m officially pooing myself, now.

So, as I’m sure you’re aware, last night a brief teaser trailer for The Impossible Astronaut aired across the various BBC channels at 9pm. If you haven’t already seen it, head on over to the main site now. Not much to see, right?

Well, er, wrong. Because there were actually two different versions. And depending on what channel you were watching – and even, it seems, what region you were in – you may have seen one or the other.