With Moff’s first Christmas special’s pre-production gearing up for a delayed August shoot, the details are starting to come forth and it seems we have the confirmation of the Big Guest Stars:

It’s been confirmed that the BAFTA-winning Sir Michael Gambon and Welsh star Katherine Jenkins are playing major roles in the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special.

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I can’t have been the only person excitedly looking forward to this. One of the best – if not the best – console rooms the TARDIS has ever had, lovingly rendered in 5-inch-figure-scale form by Character Options, who did such a great job creating a wonderful playset for the last one (I came so close to buying the thing, but sadly was living with a Who-hating ex at the time and couldn’t justify the living room space).

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So, after 11(+) weeks witnessing a story arc laid down by the THE GRAND MOFF, Lord King Master of all He Surveys, we have his delicious fruits laid bare for all to see with the first episode of the series 5 finale, The Pandorica Opens. It’s certainly fair to say that this has been the most talked about series arc since Bad Wolf, and despite the excellence of that series 1 finale, I think we were all hoping for a somewhat more meaty and satisfying conclusion this year.

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Yes, I’m looking at you, Digital Spy and IO9.

This is the “story” it is originally sourced from. It is obvious to ANYONE with a functioning brain that it is COMPLETE AND UTTER FICTION. So stop bloody giving it currency by repeating the once/twice-removed versions (I’ve seen a number of places quoting IO9 already, even though IO9 got it from Tor who got it from Pub Articles) without checking where it came from! It’s BULLSHIT.

(I’m not saying the movie isn’t happening, or anything. But this story, which purports to contain actual quotations from RTD and Depp, is a complete fabrication, and if you can’t tell that simply from reading it, you’re a MORON.)

Well, Series Fnarg is over. And we’ll have plenty of comment to come – we’ve still got reviews of both eps 12 and 13 (as it happens, a wedding – yes, on 26.06.10 – got in the way of Capps doing “Pandorica”, and I’ll do “Big Bang” once that one’s clear) to post, but as well as that we’ll also do a big old retrospective of the series as a whole, and how the episodes stand up in context, and that sort of thing.

In the meantime, though, there’s one thing that surely everybody with any sense can agree on – Matt Smith was fucking brilliant. Not just “the Eleventh Doctor”. Not just “the new Doctor”. Simply… the Doctor. Effortlessly, wonderfully so. And in reflecting on just how perfect he turned out to be in the role (and from his first moments onscreen, to boot), thoughts naturally turned to how we reacted to his casting back when it was first announced.

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Kicking this one off even earlier, just in case anyone’s got any comments/speculation they’d like to add before tomorrow evening. Remember also that we’ve got an early start tomorrow, with the episode broadcasting at 6.05pm.

But in the meantime… what do you reckon’s going to happen? As ever, actual bona fide spoilers aren’t welcome until after the episode finishes, but feel free to speculate to your hearts’ content. My favourite theory so far is as follows:

We already saw (ep 5) the doctor turn up in consecutive scenes with and without a jacket, and there’s this woman people have been calling ‘doctor’ for some time, locked in the TARDIS as it is being destroyed. I reckon she is going to find a severed limb of the doctor and touch it and for no particular reason this will clone the doctor and make her a Time Lord too and they will swan about and between the three of them stop the TARDIS from being destroyed and stop the universe from being erased.

Wait sorry, now that I’ve written it down I realise this is absolute gibberish.

My other favourite theory is that Steven “Letch” Moffat has written an episode called “The Big Bang” with Karen Gillan in it so that… oh, alright, I’ll stop there.

From Digital Spy:

Episode twelve ended with an almighty trio of cliffhangers. Can you tell us anything at all about episode 13?
“Well, there’s going to be some light music and a short note of apology saying, ‘The universe ended last week, we’re really sorry, we don’t know what you’re doing here, didn’t you get the message?’”

Does the series wrap things up with a neat resolve in time for the Christmas special?
“Well we blew up the universe, so it’ll be a nice flashback episode at Christmas.”

Will there be any kind of trailer for the Christmas special after the episode?
“After the 50 minutes of gentle music and weeping apology? Nope. The universe has ended.”

In a change from our usual way of doing things, we’re opening this one an hour before the episode – because we’re sure you’re all BURSTING WITH EXCITEMENT about the beginning of a Moffat series finale that promises to be ABSOLUTELY STONKING EXCELLENT, ACTUALLY. So if you can’t hold your excitement, talk here NOW about what you’re expecting from the ep – and of course, it’ll be here as ever immediately during/and after to catch all of your thoughts, ready to bottle up and sell to the highest bidder.

Please note, though – while speculation in the hour leading up to the episode is fine, please do not post any spoilers pertaining to things that may or may not have been seen on the internet in the past week. Anything mentioned in official BBC promo = fine. Leaked pictures from Pete McKinstry’s site or anything else you’ve found on Gallifrey Base = ABSOLUTELY NOT FINE. Otherwise, go nuts.

(And once the episode has aired, of course, you can discuss details here to your heart’s content, as usual)

First up, let’s get the obvious preconceptions out of the way.  I think James Cordon is shit.  He’s a shit comedien and a shit celebrity and I want him to cock off.  Gareth Roberts is also shit.  He has written among the worse Doctor Who scripts since the new series began and he actually ended Planet of the Dead with The Doctor suggesting that the army might be a wise career choice.  However, I didn’t go into this episode being entirely pessimistic, mainly because it’s impossible to not look forward to something with Matt Smith in it but also partly because the idea behind the episodes looked pretty good.

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Yeah, don’t click below the jump (or on any of the links in this post) if you don’t want to see what some are assuming is going to be the monster from Moffat’s First Christmas Special, but this has shown up on Pete McK’s site, under the heading COMING SOON…

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