There may well be a cliffhanger of awesomeness, but I’m betting it went “last series had trouble -> production would benefit from a break in broadcast -> well, if we’re breaking, we’d better have a great story to do it with.”

I’ve no doubt that Moffat can make the best of production necessity, write scrips that thrive on limitations. But I seriously doubt the pause is mostly about letting a twist have lasting impact. Who schedules for that?

*awaits five pounds*

There will be less of an prolonged build-up to a single, pompous finale (hooray) and at the mid point we’ll feel that something is actually at stake (hooray)

Interesting way of looking at it. This is exactly what I was hoping Tennant’s swansong year would be: in the end it wasn’t the poor quality of those episodes that was disappointing, it was the wasted opportunity to play with the format in a way the show hadn’t since Pertwee’s first season. Maybe the Moff can do it properly but the crack arc wasn’t good enough for me to get too excited.

I really don’t want more event episodes, I would like more of the well-written ones instead.

I think there’s always going to be a question mark over what an “event episode” is, though. For me, the Dalek episode in series 5 was an “event episode”, because all the interesting detective thriller stuff was abandoned after fifteen minutes to make way for some kind of Superman guff. The series finale was only an “event” because the rest of the series kept pointing to it, with so many references to the “cracks” feeling contrived and awkward.

There’s a real chance that despite there being “two openings and two finales”, or however Moffat put it, there will actually be less of a sense of “event” in the RTD sense. There will be less of an prolonged build-up to a single, pompous finale (hooray) and at the mid point (let’s say, for the sake of argument, taking the place of the lumpen Silurian effort this year, even though that wasn’t episodes 7 and we’ll feel that something is actually at stake (hooray). If Moffat is writing these episodes, then I suspect they’ll be crafted well, and the chances are he’ll feel free to dispense with other “events” like spitfires in space which served only to liven things up between the opening and the finale.

In the end, it’s very possible that doing this will create room for more of the non-event episodes we want. Plus, half of the series will be in Autumn. Possibly freeing Moffat, tonally, from the “summer blockbuster” notion of “event episodes”. We’ll see anyway, but I’m quite positive about all this.

Also, a new adventure game episode was released a few days ago. Haven’t tried it yet.