Merry Christmas, and Happy Doctor Who Day!

Before the world sees the final adventure of Matt Smith’s wonderful Doctor, I thought I’d try my hand at prognostication, and see how many of the vague ideas swirling through my head come to fruition. Heaven knows I won’t be the only one.

We all know Moffat likes to play a long game, and he’s been hinting that years’ worth of clues will be referenced and explained, so I’m going to start way back in (post-Hiatus) Series Four. The first time we, the audience, meet Professor River Song, we learn that she knows the Doctor’s name. How and why she knows it are still a mystery, but I’ve begun to think that one of my original hypotheses isn’t too far off. I mentioned in a post nearly three years ago that I thought it had to do with his thirteenth incarnation. Frankly, I’ll be surprised if that idea doesn’t prove out.

As I reported last week, we’re supposedly going to see what happens when the Doctor reaches that regeneration limit. It seems like a perfect time, then, for a terrible crisis (remember she told him she was “so sorry”) that would force him to tell River his name. After all, the prophecy as recited by Dorium Maldovar claims that “at the fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a Question will be asked.” It seems pretty clear that the timing is right, so the Question is going to be asked and answered truthfully. (Unless post-Library River returns, in which case she’s not a “living creature” and can lie all she likes.) However the prophecy plays out, though, I think this will be the moment at which (pre-Library) River learns his name, one way or another.

Moving on to Series Five, there’s the entire Crack storyline that was utterly dropped after The Big Bang. After seeing the Crack everywhere the Doctor and Amy traveled that year, and having a big deal made of the idea that the cause was the destruction of the TARDIS, we were left hanging; the Doctor sealed the Crack and rebooted the universe, but we never learned why the TARDIS exploded in the first place. Instead, the finale used a Band-Aid (that’s “a plaster,” for you Brits) to hold the plot together, and prescribed ample time to let that literary wound scab over before subjecting the story to further battering.

Said battering comes in the form of the Big Bad from Series Six, the Silence. In retrospect, we’d been hearing about them for a year already—first, in The Eleventh Hour when Prisoner Zero claimed that “Silence will fall,” and occasionally after, as when the Doctor and Rory stepped back inside the TARDIS at the end of The Vampires of Venice, having heard only “silence” (capitalization open to interpretation). By the end of Eleven’s second series, though, they’ve completely faded into the background. Aside from inspiring some cool costuming (the eye drives), they hardly even factored into the finale, having had very little to do with the whole “impossible astronaut” story by its end. Nor have they returned in any way but a name-check since. That’s two major plot arcs (intertwined ones, at that) that have been hammered on for episode after episode and then brushed under the rug.

I suspect that’s Moffat’s way of being “sneaky,” trying to get viewers to forget key plot points by ignoring them for ages before springing them back on us, like Athena from Zeus’s head. If Athena had been Frankenstein’s monster. At any rate, my basic, overall prediction is that Moffat will try to tie in “hints” and moments from the entirety of Smith’s tenure into Eleven’s final adventure to try and prove himself master of the über-arc. I’m just hoping I can stomach the results.